Anthony Jamari Thomas' Divine Intervention

November 14, 2018

Home is arguably the most underrated person, place, or thing on this planet because so many of us have the peace of mind knowing that those we love the most, including ourselves, will always have one to return to. But if we think about it, home is so much more than a place to sleep or eat, a place to get dressed in the morning before work; home is a safe haven, a sanctuary, a taste, a feeling, and a smell, a place to root and center your soul—it transcends the tangible; it cannot be written down or spoken.

Technology only fuels our apathy—everything is so constant, so immediate, that we are growing number and number to the harsh realities of another’s existence. We come home, take off our shoes, scroll through Instagram and see a picture of the migrant children that are being held in detention centers, separated from their families, torn away from their homes. We sigh, but we continue scrolling.

Interview by Kennedy Fairfax

For artist Anthony Jamari Thomas, however, the story doesn’t end there.

We live in a particularly repressive political moment, where those in positions of power have demonstrated time and time again that they do not deserve to have that power in the first place. One of the greatest examples of this has been the ongoing treatment of immigrants in this country. It is this very treatment that forms the conceptual crux of Thomas’s new book, LAMB. Published by Paradigm, this publication is not only a bold exploration of the ways in which the migrant body is handled—both literally and symbolically—but an acknowledgement of the sacrifice and bravery inherent to migrancy itself.

In addition to the book, Thomas supplemented LAMB with a performance piece, in which he spent 24 hours inside a wooden box without food or water in protest of and in homage to the migrant experience, alongside alternative R&B artist BarringtonELECT, who curated the sounds and sang to enhance the atmosphere. One can always pledge allegiance to a worthy cause, but there will always be that conveniently comfortable distance that separates the one who has experienced the act and the one who protests for the one who has experienced it.

Thomas, in his own capacity, has worked to mend that distance, to step into the shoes of and to illuminate the experiences of the brown body, in the best way he knows how.

What initially sparked your interest in art?

When I was 17, I dealt with depression and anxiety on a great level. I wanted to take my own life—when I was 13, as well. Then, when I turned 21, I battled alcoholism and it took me a little bit to get sober. So, I wanted to find a way to be therapeutic about how I was dealing with my depression. I started to have suicidal ideations, and that’s when I thought, ‘Man, this has to get fixed.’ I come from a Baptist Christian background, so therapy and all that other stuff doesn’t really work—it’s a ‘We ain’t paying for that’ kind of situation. As a kid, I remember my mom told me once—and she’s the most incredible person in the world—but she was like, ‘Just go get some food, go to bed and when you wake up, you should be okay.’ Of course, I knew that just wasn’t going to be the end of it.

So, one day, while I was working on this project to honor my grandmother, I had like thirty cents on me, and someone told me to go buy a canvas and make a piece. When I did it, it felt so relieving. I never studied art, I never took studio art. I did art history for semester, and it was basically just memory, so I really wasn’t learning anything.

Did you ever study art?

I did art history for a semester, but no I never did studio art. You just either got it or you don’t. And I feel like god gave me this gift because I didn’t have to seek any academic instruction. So, I’m just thankful that I can create as fluidly as I do, and to be able to make a reality for myself through it, because it saved me from the reality that I was in.

What to you is the correlation between body and power? Why is the body the most powerful instrument, or the most powerful, visceral medium of expression?

I think it’s like an inner-chamber thing—the body has a way of relying on space, and space relies on the body. The crux of my work deals with the black body, and examining how the black body exists in space in relationship to institutions, to history. Our bodies have been placed in a very controversial time because there is this tension where we want to live in a contemporary way and try to understand what our blackness represents now. But we want to understand what it was before us, and what it represented before us, and the mythology behind the black body because you kind of don’t know your beginnings until you find, and discover, and unearth—and it takes some work to do that.

I’ve understood the body as an object that transfers the spiritual and the divine—it transfers a lot of the things we can’t see on the day-to-day. The body is a prime medium for all things—for policy, for socio-economic ideals. It’s a vessel that can channel so much, but once you start adding a geography to it—where the body is placed, how big or small the body is in relation to its surrounding community—that’s when you start to understand your own body and it’s position of power within the place in which you are situated. So, I think the body and power go hand in hand, but they’re not always bipartisan. Sometimes your body moves on it’s own, and power happens to your body; then your body can posses that power, and power can take over your body—it’s fluid, there’s a synchronicity. Other times, the body and power are totally detached—that’s the beauty of it. But power on its own is a crazy construct I’m still trying to figure out.

Yeah, power is completely relative so it’s almost impossible to define it in a finite way. What place—fictional or non-fictional, symbolic or literal—is the single biggest source of inspiration to you?

My aunt’s home. My Aunt Mary passed away April 21 at 2AM—I was the last person she saw before she died. She died twice in this lifetime actually—once, in ‘97 for ten minutes, and my mom brought her back to life with CPR. Then she unfortunately passed away in April. She was everything to our family. She was an archivist, the religious crux of the family—we all knew Christianity because of her, and she inherited Christianity because she grew up in the segregated South. The first political means of activism in the South against racism was religion—it was the church, a congregation of people that looked like you, speaking to a higher power that can hopefully save you from your reality. Then, she came to Bed-Stuy in ‘62. She had four sisters and they all passed through her house, because she was the first to move here from Virginia. So, the guest room of that house is where my mom grew up, and where she raised me. Her home has everything in it. We’re talking 1962 to 2018, so there’s family photo albums, memories, all types of doctorates and religious texts, and by the grace of God, when I was eleven years old, she left her home to me.

Now, it’s my space, and the crazy thing is, the back room where my mom raised me is now where I paint—it’s my studio. So, all of the things that I want to explore, all the things that I want to speak on, all the things that I’m curious about—they live in that home.

Nothing is chaotic, everything is divine intervention.

Like what?

The way my body performs in society, the way money performs in my community, the way space and owning property performs in my community—I contemplate these type of things in that space. There is some type of geographic social-engineering to how my people and I think, because if you place certain people of the same ethnicity within the same community and keep them there for a while through economic means—I’m talking about inner-city, underprivileged, underdeveloped youth—you can control how far these kids are allowed to dream. For me, that apartment is a space where I get to dream as big as possible, because my aunt took those risks.

So, the biggest thing for me—the biggest inspiration for my work—is just love, so much love. But I also want to expose the fallacies of man, and put those kind of points onto the scale. We are very beautiful and gifted beings, but we have tension, we have faults, we are of the flesh, and as you said, with flesh comes power. Sometimes you find yourself losing your power to other flesh, and the actions of other bodies. But that’s why art is so dope—because you get to create your own atmosphere—an atmospheric value that no one can take away, because it’s yours. So, I don’t want to say it’s fictional, but my inspiration comes from just having a space that my family owned that I can create in.

Now I understand why this idea of collective memory resonates so strongly with you and your work.

Yeah, because it was always odd to me to go to my aunt’s and see black cabbage patch kids and those little dolls, and the little black babies praying and playing the drums. Then I would go to my grandmother’s house in the projects and she had the same exact decorations. When you’re in a specific community, there are certain things that we are just drawn to—things that we love to keep around that remind us of freedom, and spirit, and funk, and soul.

What about home as a concept—what is the significance of having a home? What to you makes something a home? And how is the concept of the home visualized and symbolized within your work?

With LAMB, the idea of the home was one of the biggest things. I really like the idea of photography in the sense that you can create an object, and once it’s printed, or becomes digital, it becomes a landscape, it becomes a canvas, it becomes this modular thing. Whatever you place in the proximity of the object, it’s either amplified or diminished. When you give photographs an arrangement, like you see on the wall, you get to see all these different algorithms in between—like jazz, the notes in between. So with LAMB, I was learning two things: the first being to make a photograph symbolic of something bigger than just a selfish vanity; the second was how to make a home for these people that I care so much about and respect, who are constantly moving in order for them to actually have a place—a living sustainability.

After I finished this project, I started to understand that there is a real sincerity behind the migrant body—it’s not so politicized and abused and as flagrant as media paints it as. They’re not victims in the sense that they’re trying to find who they are, because in order for them to migrate in search of a better life, you have to know what you want out of life in the first place. You have to have an identity of hope to try to pursue a dream, then to have that dream taken away from you—taking children away from their families and placing them in these detention centers—the government is crushing dreams on a crazy level. I took the this idea and wove it into my own personal narrative, placing it within the context of my own brown body. Effectively, through history, I am told that I can’t dream as much as I want to—I have to wait until somebody authorizes it, until somebody gives me the authority to say ‘Dream, lil homie, do your thing.’

What I like about the idea of migrancy is that you are constantly moving, constantly adapting your dream to something new, and that’s perseverance, that’s sacrifice—that’s survival. The home is important because you get to expand yourself, you get to stretch your skin out, and fill these spaces with your ideas. I’ve been blessed enough by god to have been raised in a home, and now, to get to work in that space as my studio. So, to think about bodies who want that—who thirst for that—bodies who not only want the typical American dream, they want the chance to have a dream in the first place, and they’re being told no? I can’t even fathom that.

Do you believe artists have an inherent political and/or cultural obligation to use their medium as an instrument of change?

I don’t think it’s an obligation—it’s a choice. As an artist, I know that when you’re down to the wire and just want to make some work, get your therapy down, you’re not necessarily thinking about the world. At the same time, though, circumstances present themselves that compel you to make work that helps you to express yourself and comment on the world. My biggest thing is understanding the beautiful point where public and private meet—where your privatized life becomes something that is affected by public commentary. That’s a choice you have to make—to yourself, ‘Yo, I’m gonna make work that consistently speaks on things that I think are wrong, or things that I think are right.’

Some artists don’t care to do that because they already know how deep and dark this thing goes, and they don’t even want to try to go there, because once you do, if you’re really about that money, you realize, ‘Man, my collectors don’t want to buy my work, because they think that they’re doing some kind of rebellion or protest against the status quo.’ There’s a tension arises around purchasing a subversive piece, and who wants that static? Some people want the smoke—they really want to make a statement. For me, it’s not really making a statement so much as the government and the political regimes my family has lived through, and the times now that have presented me with context and reference to support the things that I feel. I am contributing to the conversation by creating this whole book, but my motive was to illuminate the immigrant body, not to take the light away.

What do you think is the relationship between intention and reception?

Reception is a beautiful thing because you get to take it in, regardless of what the intent was. To go back to the body and power thing—once an action leaves the body and transfers to another one, you no longer care what the intent is, you just want to know, ‘Why did you do that? Why did that happen?’ That reflection is where a lot of reception gets fucked up. So, I try to stay more on the receiving side.

A lot taken away from me this year, and I fought hard to be where I am right now. I love all my brothers and sisters—my family—and that’s why I think this book was so dope—because everybody gave to me without needing a reason to do so—everybody just came out. That’s when you receive and don’t question the intention behind what is being given. Nothing is chaotic, everything is divine intervention, everything is by god’s design. I think if you spend more time trying to understand that you are a vessel worthy of receiving, even the bad things will help you live more righteously.

I think artistic creation is a process of self-discovery. Often you have this idea in your head, but when you embark on the journey of manifesting that idea, it’s nothing like you thought it was going to be, but in the most beautiful way possible. Have you learned anything about yourself through the process of creating LAMB?

Honestly, I learned that I am a prophet through my work. I think god gave me a message and this was my way of delivering it to the world. I put a lot on the line for this, even having made this piece when I was in the depths of depression, and I think it’s a beautiful thing for me, too, because now I know the power of my voice—I don’t take this shit for granted.

Let’s talk about your performance piece. Did you do anything specific as far as mental and physical preparation before the show?

For this, because we’re going to be here for 24 hours, I had to fast. I fasted last week for four days, not eating throughout the day, and going to sleep around 7PM. My body felt so vulnerable and so weak, yet so strong—it was like my body was trying to chose which identity to have. Through the process, I was better able to understand the temptations of the body, and my body chose lust in the sense that the things I don’t normally see as vices, such as food and rest, I never wanted more in my life. The reason I chose to be in this installation for as long as this, is because I felt throughout making the book, things were hella chaotic for me. I lost three family members over the summer and I was in a car accident. I also lost a very good relationship that I had because of a misunderstanding. Through all that, I was still able to make this book, and that, for me, is perseverance. I focused so hard on making this object real in my head that even though all this chaos was happening around me, I was still able to create LAMB.

What was the goal behind the installation?

I know there are children right now sitting in detention centers wondering where their moms and their pops are, and I think controlling visibility right now, as a brown body, and also as an immigrant, is incredibly important. On a personal level, my practice is pushing me to think about how to be still, understand chaos in a more strategic and divine way, while also representing these bodies that are being detained and completely mishandled. This is my protest, my sit-in for them. I know I’m just a 27-year-old young homie from Bed-Stuy, and I am so far removed from a 6-year-old Mexican girl trying to eat her scheduled breakfast in the morning. But tonight, we get to connect those worlds, and that’s what I will be thinking about—how to really connect with that energy out there through god.

After we finish this, we’re going to take that energy everywhere—we want it to be as revolutionary as possible. But the revolution isn’t stated by the subject that is orchestrating the action—the revolution is defined by the people. So, we’re waiting on the people to see what we’re doing. We’ll see what happens.

'LAMB' is out now via Paradigm Publishing.

Photos courtesy of the artist.

Art

'Sacredness Is' at Fondazione Merz

Lena-Kuzmich CHIMERA, 2022, animation film and installation 9:30min.

The film has inspired many artists since its release nearly sixty years ago, and is currently serving as the basis for a new group exhibition, Sacro è, at the Fondazione Merz in Turin. Curated by Giulia Turconi and featuring work by artists Tiphaine Calmettes, Matilde Cassani, Giuseppe Di Liberto, Lena Kuzmich, Quỳnh Lâm, Tommy Malekoff, Lorenzo Montinaro, and GianMarco Porru, the show investigates the concept of sacredness as found in everyday things. Like Stamp’s character, the exhibiting artists seek to expose the potential for transformation and spiritual reinvention within the quotidian, and achieve this through works spanning performance, installation, sculpture, painting, and video.

Giuseppe Di Liberto, Sparge la morte, performance al Teatros del Canal, Madrid, 2022. Photo Pablo Lorente. Courtesy the artist.

Giuseppe Di Liberto, Ghirlanda, 2020. Courtesy the artist.

The exhibition’s opening coincided with a live performance by the artist Giuseppe Di Liberto on the evening of March 18th, 2024. The production, Sparge la morte (2022), was originally performed by Di Liberto and his brother Davide two years ago, and features music by the madrigal composer Carl Gesualdo. Inspired by a walk the brothers took in a cemetery in Naples, the piece’s choreography mimics the traditional death ritual of sin eating. Popular in border regions in the 18th and 19th centuries, sin eating involved the ceremonial eating and drinking in the presence of a corpse, and was believed to absolve the deceased of their wrongdoings.

The performance immediately set the tone for the rest of the exhibition with its stark portrayal of the extremes of life and death, ascension and degradation. As Gesualdo’s score resounded from behind a curtain, the brothers stalked up and down the Fondazione Merz’s spacious front room, retracing their steps in an obsessive trance and glancing out at the viewers as though from beyond the grave. Here, the fraternal aspect added an even more ominous edge to the already dark happenings: at times, it seemed that each brother might overcome the other entirely — and the audience as well. When the performance was over, the two hugged; still, a suggestion of danger and the possibility for a potential devouring lingered in the air.

Tiphaine Calmettes Hutte à mains, 2022. Photo Pierre Antoine.

Tiphaine Calmettes Ménhir à alcôve, 2022. Photo Pierre Antoine.

Echoing the themes of consumption and imbibing present in Di Liberto’s work, the French artist Tiphaine Calmettes presents Primordial Soup (2022), a clay and earth sculpture that doubles as a cauldron. Inside the cauldron is a vat of hot, blood-colored soup available for spectators to sample. In an exhibit inspired by a film that was condemned by the Vatican and led its director to be charged with indecency (Pasolini was eventually acquitted), it is the most overtly sexual work: its materials pass directly from the artist to the lips and into organs of the spectator. If this erotic transfer were not enough, the cauldron resembles a Venus figurine, with exteriorally-hung ladles that call to mind pendulous breasts.

Tommy Malekoff Desire Lines, 2019. Two channel digital video and sound 15:42 min. Courtesy of the artist.

In a separate room, a video work by New-York based, American artist Tommy Malekoff, Desire Lines (2019), plays on an endless loop. Filmed across fourteen states between August 2017 and March 2019 on a handheld camcorder, the fifteen-minute film is described as an “ode to the surreal potential of parking lots across America”, and focuses solely on the aforementioned liminal space. A kind of reimagining of the famed John Cheever story “The Swimmer” (1964), in which a probably deranged man decides to swim home only through his neighbors’ backyard pools, Desire Lines criss-crosses the U.S. by means of a different, but similarly common landscape.

In the film, we witness a variety of scenarios play out across multiple parking lots, including but not limited to: a firework display set off by shirtless teenage boys, a herd of iguanas passing idly through, a prayer circle that release a rosary of balloons, a military drill in full action, a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty juggling batons, a beer drinking competition, kids arriving by horse at a Sioux Nation shopping center, and a solo dancer using a cardboard box as his makeshift stage. Like Pasolini, Malekoff trains his lens on the banal, finding there an explosion of previously untapped potential and people desperately waiting to be seen.

Lena-Kuzmich CHIMERA, 2022, animation film and installation 9:30min. Sound Design by Leonard Prochazka. Graphic Design by Winona Hudcová

Despite the excellence of the work by Di Liberto, Calmettes, Malekoff, and the other artists, it was the Austrian Lena Kuzmich who best surmised the central themes of Sacro è. In their video installation, Chimera (2022), Kuzmich examines queer ecology and nonbinary life within nature, questioning what defines humans as a species. As the video came to a close, bold, all capitalized letters flashed across a screen in the Fondazione Merz’s basement: LIVE LOVE FUCK DECAY TRANSCEND. Pasolini, one imagines, might just approve.

Sacro è, is open at the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy from the 18th of March to the 16th of June, 2024. Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) will be screened in accordance with the exhibition in the Fondazione’s cinema room on the 23rd of March, the 18th of May and the 8th of June at 4pm, the 10th of April, the 8th of May and the 29th May at 5pm, and the 21st of April and the 16th of June at 11.30am.

Art

Tali Lennox Walks Between Worlds

Belladonna, 2023

The results are just as vivid as her psychic landscape. Rendered in oil on canvas, her latest series merges mythological and folkloric references with Lennox’s own symbolic lexicon. There are shells and shrouded figures; bodies of water and gleaming oysters; crying eyes and rays of light. Women’s bodies appear in a state somewhere between pain and pleasure, tension and release, orgasm and apocalypse. Evoking the beauty and savagery of the natural world, Lennox probes our contemporary ennui and enduring fascination with the end times—finding solace in the idea of nature as the highest power, and surrendering to its cycles of creation and destruction. Currently on view at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles for her latest solo exhibition, Tremors, the paintings invite viewers to join Lennox in the space between. After all, Lennox says, “Life is but a dream."

Themes of apocalypse and end times are very front of mind these days. What do you see as the role of art in helping people process this?

I believe that painting has the power to open up pockets within us where we can access the things we’re fearful of. The show’s title, Tremors, is referencing this sort of secret fear within me, which I think everyone can relate to right now. We are in a time of general unease; there’s this sense of potential disaster or oncoming decline. I started contemplating what it means to tune into that powerlessness and the feeling of surrender. From there, I started thinking about the bigger picture: contemplating the history of the universe and the fact that the world has always had such dramatic huge cycles of change beyond what I can even comprehend.

For the past two years, my boyfriend and I have gone to sleep listening to a series called The Fall of Civilizations, which is about different empires from the past and how they fell. When you start thinking about that scope of time, you realize that above and beyond our experiences, nature has always been the puppeteer. When you also bring the element of magic or fantasy into the equation, it leads you back to the notion that life is but a dream. At the end of the day, if there have been civilizations that have lasted for centuries and centuries, and then suddenly they’re just gone, what was it to begin with?

Within the show, I’ve tried to express the tension between the minutiae of internal experiences and the expansion of the external—[finding the] fusion of that within nature. The metamorphosis of nature, the power of nature overcoming humans, this dual savagery or beauty that nature holds, and the question of, Is this a utopia or an apocalypse?

There is a meaning behind everything I do, so there are lots of little doorways to open if one pleases. It’s like a secret within a secret.

Mythology is central to the series. Where did you draw inspiration from existing folkloric legends, and which symbols and motifs arose from your own experiences in the world?

At one point, I was in Greece and I was going to quite a few caves. Some of the most profound, mesmerizing experiences I’ve ever had have been in caves and cenotes. It’s this primal feeling; it’s womb-like, it’s elemental, it’s ancient.

I love this notion of the great return, and I symbolize it with shells, with water, with oysters—which, of course, could be interpreted as female anatomy. It’s like the birth of Aphrodite; it reminds one of coming back to the ocean, to water, to the womb.

Tell me about the books or historical sources that inspired your approach.

There’s this very large, very old book from 16th-century Germany called the Augsburg Book of Miracles. It’s full of gouache paintings of very surreal apocalyptic scenes. There are comets, there are swarms of locusts, there are strange mythological creatures, there are images where it’s raining flesh and blood, there are rainbows. It just has this sense of mysticism, wonderment, and total unease. Nobody knows who made the book—it’s a mystery.

I also read a book called Medieval Bodies, and learned that in the middle ages, there were a lot of interesting parallels being drawn between human body parts and parts of nature. The lungs are like the wings of a bird, symbolizing flight, breathing, movement, and life force. The nervous system and the brain are like tree roots. It goes back to this kind of external, internal relationship between nature and the human body. So I think that’s also where I got a lot of these motifs of shells and barnacles and metamorphosis.

How much are you consciously crafting these layers of meaning, and how much of the work is free-associative?

I’ve never wanted to create paintings that make people feel one singular thing. I think it’s fascinating to let people go on their internal journeys with what these symbols might portray for them. There is a meaning behind everything I do, so there are lots of little doorways to open if one pleases. It’s like a secret within a secret.

For example, Touching the Vessel, that painting with the silver metalwork, is a reference to Betony Vernon’s jewel tools. To me, the work she does is like a metaphor: she’s making these beautiful objects that allow people to erupt in a sense, to open, to break through. These objects are like a symbol of physical transcendence. So they were a metaphor for orgasm and out-of-body experience. And I love that the same motif that conveys disaster and chaos can also be a symbol of pleasure and transcendence.

<em>Touching the Vessel</em>, 2023 — *Touching the Vessel*, 2023

I’m curious about your own experiences—have you had any out-of-body experiences, or experiences that completely shifted your perception of the world?

Through methods of alternative healing, I have had experiences that made me feel that my sense of reality, my sense of existence in the world, was turned inside out. I’ve had these moments come not just from beauty but from pain. Again, it’s like life cycles: You get these breakages in nature, these massive ruptures, and after that, something transforms. Before the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis, a caterpillar has to turn into goo.

We can’t live in a state of eruption or transcendence all the time; it’s always going to be temporary. But human beings are constantly being led by the longing for a feeling of spiritual openness and enlightenment. When I think of this human longing, of searching and looking for a sense of eruption, there’s also a great vulnerability in that. Every time I’ve had these experiences of rupturing and healing, it always came with a torrent of grief. That’s also where I get this term from like expulsion: this sense of being cracked open. Loss has led to the most painful and the most beautiful transformative experiences of my life. There’s an analogy I always think of: somebody gives you a set of hot, rusted keys, and nobody wants to hold them because they burn your hands. But then when you do hold them and sit with the discomfort til they cool, you can use the key as a tool to open up new parts of yourself.

You said in another interview that you’re attracted to vessels and objects that have these connections to other narratives. Could you elaborate on that?

I find it fascinating how human beings try to connect to spirit: this striving to feel more than body, more than mind. I’ve always been enamored with objects of worship—how as humans we create these shrines. When we all collectively put energy into one object, projecting all this thought and emotional dependence onto a material thing, it’s like a form of magic—it almost comes alive. It means everything, but it also means nothing. Similarly, these paintings can mean so much when I’m doing them, but they also mean nothing; they’re just pigment on canvas. There’s such poetry to that, and it also relates like objects of worship: How much potency can you put in one piece of material?

My work as a painter is such a private experience; I’m someone who gets addicted to being alone, and I’ve had, in the past, obsessions with building little shrines and sitting with objects and collecting trinkets, treasures, remnants. And there are also portals to at least make us feel like we are traveling to another realm. New age groups use holy water, like in ancient cultures, and I think it’s beautiful—but there’s also an element of make-believe, a childishness to that. And I think perhaps that’s why my paintings carry a sense of unease but also belief, wonderment, and a bit of madness as well. I wanted the show to be a journey, almost like a fairy tale: how there are moments of beauty and sacrilege and fear and perhaps a little bit of horror. I want it to feel like you are in the midst of a spell.

Left: Love Belt, 2023

Right: Warm Chains, 2023

Left: Fool’s Arcadia, 2023

Right: Vial, 2023

Your paintings are so dreamlike they make me wonder: What are your dreams like?

When I was a child, I would be extremely taken by my dreams. I had different phases of sleepwalking, where I would walk around my house with my eyes open. Sometimes I would even wake up and be conscious, but I would see everything [as though I was] still in the dream—all my visuals were in a different place, but at the same time, I was coherent. One time I woke up and I was very much convinced I was Alice in Wonderland. I even woke my dad up and said I don’t know what to do, I’m growing out of our house! I remember being quite embarrassed about it. Another time I was walking up and down my house, and I couldn’t stop moving my arms. It was almost like Sydenham's chorea, that jerky kind of bodily illness at the turn of the century.

So yeah—lots of things have come out in dreamtime! I think dreams are so interesting, and kind of like painting: a process in which the psychological phantasmagoria of daily experience is regurgitated. When I would sleepwalk as a child, I was between a state of dream and conscious reality. And it goes back to these spaces I love: the in-between space, the void between two realms. Most of the paintings, if they’re in a landscape, it’s always twilight. It’s my favorite time, that space between night and day, between the lightness and the darkness. The day’s ended, it’s already like a faded memory… It’s already happened, and you can’t go back to it—and then it’s the mystery of the night.

Tali Lennox: Tremors is on view at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles through April 6.

Art

Through Ezekiel's Peephole

March 27, 2024

In “Footnote to Howl,” Allen Ginsberg writes, “The world is holy!…The bum’s as holy as the seraphim!” Filipino London-based photographer Ezekiel took that sentiment and ran. With the second installation of their photobook series, SMUT, Ezekiel puts an eye on the voyeurs so often seen in gay porn, taking a campy yet refreshingly reverent view through the literal and metaphorical peephole.

Ezekiel delves into different voyeurist archetypes within masculine queerness, featuring characters like the Cruiser, the Neighbor, the Roommate. While voyeurism is a recurring theme in pornographic narratives, true voyeurism, characterized by an unknowing subject, is rarely achieveable. Nowadays, everyone know’s theyre being watched, everyone wants to be watched, and everyone’s in on the joke. Can anyone truly be a voyeur if we’re all just watching ourselves?

Buy SMUT Volume II: Voyeurism here

By Izzy Capulong
Photography by Ezekiel

We meet at Friend Editions, where Ezekiel's photos and books are displayed. In talking about the Cruising story, they note the support they received from their parents. Both of us come from Catholic school and FIlipino immigrants — we were both rightfully surprised. Apparently their mom is still trying to get them to become a priest. I’m in a suit, they’re in a skirt, the situational irony is not lost upon either of us. But, even if their parents didn’t get their queer erotic photography, the support is still endearing. Apparently, while shooting, Ezekiel’s father had been excited to drive everyone around, beaming after hearing there was a famous gay pornstar in his backseat.

While Volume 1 of SMUT consists of more documentary style snapshots of the lives of female friends who are sex workers, Volume 2 is a more of an editorial. Yet, as has been notably lacking in the fashion industry, there’s a level of respect and intimacy between photographer and model, evident in how Ezekiel speaks of the production of their book. They reminisce on each model by name — friends, pornstars, friends who are pornstars, gogoboys, and someone’s silver fox uncle who was discovered at a wedding — who was apparently so excited to get spanked on camera, that he bought a train ticket to London for the entire day.

office — What was your first introduction to porn?

Ezekiel — I would say my first intro to ‘pornographic’ material was when we immigrated to the UK in the early 2000s and the top shelves of British corner shops (aka bodegas) would be lined with ‘Lads Mags’ such as Zoo and Nuts magazines, which would often have a half-naked or provocatively posed woman on the front cover. In terms of my first pornographic video, I remember it quite vividly. It was a homemade tape of some old guy masturbating that was uploaded onto Xvideos, which I secretly watched on the family computer whilst the rest of my family were out (sorry Mum and Dad).

Is there a relationship between the desire to observe and the desire to be observed?

Absolutely, especially in queer culture. Gay people have a tendency to be always looking for people like them, whether that be in a sexual manner or in a way to find comfort within spaces that are dominantly heterosexual. We just have a natural ability to find and gravitate towards each other in any situation. In my opinion, to be observed is to be acknowledged and seen, and the desire to be observed is a desire to exist.

Some people theorize that identity construction relies on performance for an audience — whether it be real or imaginary. Do you believe in the internal voyeur?

That’s a very interesting take, I think the idea of identity construction via performance is prevalent now more than ever especially due to the digital age we live in. Everyone’s always performing (whether they like it or not) for some sort of audience. Some could say that day-to-day life is inherently performative, or even just being an adult; where you have to sort of perform the idea that you have a career and your whole life figured out. So to answer your question, yes, I do believe in an internal voyeur because it’s hard for the idea of external voyeurs not to seep inwards.

What's your voyeurist fantasy?

At this moment, my ideal fantasy is to not be perceived in any way shape or form. Basically just don’t look at me, but maybe do… But don’t tell me you’re watching of course, or else this wouldn’t be a voyeurist fantasy at all.

Some photos involve Ezekiel themself, adding a third layer of observation and making us question where we stand on the spectrum of watcher to watched. Ezekiel does this story referencing the phenomena of Sleep Streaming, where people will pretend to sleep on camera and undress as more donations come in. Performers feign ignorance and pretend to be aloof to the fact that they are being watched, despite the fact that they themselves were the ones who set up the stream, who positioned the camera, and who are secretly conscious and awaiting viewers. Is that not the case for the digital age? Are we all not just walking around SoHo hoping for some street photographer to catch us looking unbothered and offhandedly stylish? Are we all not subconscioiusly performing for the thousands of newly minted party photographers that seem to keep popping up around the city? Are we not all sometimes our own neighbor in the window?