In Creation There's Destruction

Her aesthetic is drastic simplicity crossed with florid intellectual eloquence: internet Clipart and a robotic digital audio voice clash, mesh and blossom through concepts of God and country, nuclear power and nature, family ties and, of course, the digital interface that has become the go-to medium through which we navigate it all.

After a walk through Rubber Factory, office spoke with Majeed about Islamic kitcsh and theoretical physics.

Tell me about the show.

So, the show is called In the Name of the Hypersurface of the Present. It’s based on two years of research I did around the nuclear history of Pakistan. The investigation started with looking at a monument that commemorated the nuclear armament that happened in the 1990s, and the monument doesn’t exist anymore, so in a way, the research and the work retrace this recent past. I use both material I got from Facebook, nationalist groups around Pakistani military, and also I looked at my grandfather’s photographic archives—he was an analog photographer, and he had nationalist leanings, so his political stance was very pro-Pakistan. Then, I also looked at Urdu literature around science and poetry—Urdu is the language of Pakistan.

So, it’s an amalgamation of all these things, but when you go to the show, it’s based around this idea of green, and the green kind of represents an intersection of Pakistani nationalism. But it’s also the color of Islam, which it’s known as. Saudi Arabia uses green as a color, and Malaysia—multiple countries look at the color green as the color of Islam, so it gets used in a lot of Islamic kitsch. I also refer to green as the digital interface, this idea of green-screening, a space for projection. Green is also representative of the military, and I'm looking at the nuclear history, the military history. Using the color green also refers to landscape, homeland, so in a way, when you enter the show, it’s an unfolding of that—where green refers to landscape and body, and this intersection of poetics of love for homeland, as well as science and state propaganda that’s used to uphold nationalist love. So, it’s a mix of all these things.

Do you know what happened to the monument you were referring to?

I’m actually working on putting together a lecture performance where I chronicle the history of the monument, looking at the rumors. Because the state monument is this really ugly fiberglass reproduction of a mountain, it basically is not taken seriously by architects, academics. So, the the motif of the mountain itself becomes like looking through the perspective of a monument, a kind of alternate history. That’s how I was trying to look at it—through this monument. One part of the lecture performance is basically gathering all the pieces of information that have been put out there by the state. So, for example, the monument was built in the 1990s and it was built to commemorate a holiday that translates to ‘The Day of God’s Greatness,’ and it happens every year, and the monument was built to bring the public—meaning men, who occupy public space—to come to the monument to celebrate.

So, it was built in different metropolitan cities—in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. In Karachi, it was destroyed in the early 2000s because the father of the atomic bomb in Pakistan—the guy who headed the nuclear project—he got arrested by the state because there were rumors that he leaked nuclear scientific knowledge to other countries. So, he was under house arrest for ten years. During that time, because of the weight of nuclear history and religiosity is so intertwined, they look at this person kind of as a figure to represent their religion and nationalism all in one. So, when he was arrested, the public—and by ‘the public’ I mean very specific male patriarchal, the dominant class—they ended up burning the monument. In Lahore, the monument was built near a railway station and it was taken down by the state because there were rumors that the station was invaded by terrorists and they used the monument as a shield and attacked people in the railway station. Then in Islamabad, the capital, in 2016, the monument resided in this roundabout, and due to the current urbanization policies of the recently deposed prime minister, they were expanding roads throughout the country, and the monument was supposed to be relocated. It was removed and destroyed so they could expand the roads, and it was supposed to be relocated in a major park in another part of Islamabad.

One of the main videos I made for the show starts with the relocation of this monument. It’s thinking through this monument that is returning to a kind of pure, natural—even though a park is not necessarily a pure landscape—but in a way, it’s a return to origins, a return to nature. So, that’s where the entire show is encapsulated—these references to flora and fauna and landscape and the garden and the way of the garden.

There’s a kind of female re-imagining of history happening as well, correct?

In the first two videos in the first two rooms, is my voiceover, but my voiceover is through a fictional poet. So, there’s a querying of this poet, who represents the state. It’s a feminist re-articulation, but also making visible how women are used as containers for state propaganda. The atomic bomb or landscape can also be intertwined with the idea of the woman, the rebirth of the nation—so, in a way, making that visible is a part of the project. The female form is visible even in the reference of the flower—in both of the videos in the front, there’s a constant reference to flora, and that is a direct reference to the woman. In the back room, in the projection piece, there is the visibility of the female as a kind of sampler of the way in which you can gain the purest national love, the performativity of pulling the ear, and allowing the green light to enter certain parts of your body. I actually published a spec fiction piece about green light entering the body igniting the motif of the cone. This overall large, two-year project is continuously expanding, so what I’m showing at the gallery is like an excerpt to test your taste about all these ideas.

It almost reminds me of a video game—it feels like there’s a plot.

One of the narrative tools is looking through the interface. I used certain imagery, certain memes, and collaged them and played with them to see that there’s a kind of violence within this imagery that is disseminated and passed down.

I just read this article about how the internet and social media’s original goal was to make a more open society, but actually it’s helping autocratic urges more than it is helping people to be more open and democratic. Do you feel like this connects to your show?

Definitely. There’s a connection to these nationalist uprisings and conservatism—these uprisings that have been happening for the last few years—and it’s looking at ways in which the digital interface is subsumed by those nationalist movements—it becomes a tool used as an extension of state propaganda. You can look at the ways, beyond the context of Pakistan or any specific state, that these patterns form. Post-Arab Spring in Egypt, for example—the state has so much control over censorship, over the internet, and that was the very tool to bring people together and mobilize people to protest, but then that very tool has become detrimental to the very people that mobilized in the first place. It’s very easy for the state to target these individuals.

What’s interesting to me in regards to the digital interface are the subtleties. My interpretation when looking at the nuclear history wasn’t this kind of spectacular dominant narrative, but looking at the smaller, the micro-lens—looking through these memes that are disseminated that are kind of subversive techniques of state propaganda. I’m also looking at say, my grandfather’s photography, that is quite beautiful, but the fact that he showed at a government institute in the '90s in Pakistan reflects his politics at a certain time as someone who’s an artist. So, in a way, it’s a very difficult line to draw between the military, art infrastructure—it’s all subsumed. That’s how the nuclear project came about: in the name of God. So, in the name of God, the nation of Pakistan had to protect itself because of larger threats. So, there was a lot of material through media that was disseminated about becoming a nuclear power, and at the start of it, the rhetoric around it was ‘This is the only way,’ which is how state propaganda works. It was embedded in love, and beauty, and in the name of Pakistan, so therefore it’s a very thin line to distinguish what's real and what isn’t. And we can see the implications of that in other nations today. So, I use Pakistan as a site, but I’m also thinking about larger, global ideas, of how the state functions and how the interface is used. I’m also interested in how the body, as a citizen, reacts to that, and how it’s used in that whole process, even through the digital interface.

I’m interested in this idea of Islamic kitsch you mentioned earlier. I love the idea of kitsch—what do you define it as?

Right. I was talking about the color green and how it’s used in a lot of religious iconography as a symbol of Islam. Throughout the show, there’s a juxtaposition of internet art—I wouldn’t necessarily want to label it as kitsch—but there’s a lot of collage. There’s a lot of material from books—for example, the Urdu books I refer to all have appropriated imagery from let’s say Google, pixelated imagery. The colors, the luminosity, they’re actually from the materials I gathered myself. So, it’s not necessarily labeled as Islamic kitsch, but it’s a form of publication that is used in Pakistan, and the internet—I appropriated from that.

The title of the show is really bizarre and fun. Where did it come from?

It actually refers to ‘In the Name of God’ rhetoric. ‘Hypersurface of the Present’ refers to theoretical physics, it’s an actual theory—it’s a measurement of space and time. There’s an actual formula. I, basically, in the digital publication I’d mentioned, take diagrams and references of the cone, and write this fiction around it. So, the show is a combination of these poetics—of science and how the state represents science, and this state religiosity.

I’m still stuck on this monument you were talking about.

It was the start of the whole project, actually. I can see why—it’s a replication of nature, tied to a religious holiday and commemorating nuclear arms, and it no longer exists. There’s a lot attached to it. In the lecture performance, I use this fictional poet to speak about the poetics of that—when is the moment that this monument exist? Is it the moment that it’s destroyed? Similar to the atomic blast—the atomic blast, or nuclear power, is only visible in this kind of destruction. The fact that none of these monuments no longer exist—is that a reproduction of that power? One of the lines in the videos is, ‘In this creation there is destruction, in this destruction, it can be created.’ There’s this fine line—which is what nuclear power is—there’s this suspension and anticipation. That’s the narrative around nuclear power.

I’m actually going back to Pakistan in December for another project. I’m interested in expanding another chapter of this project in relation to a specific poem that my grandfather used. So, the reason why I introduced my grandfather’s archival material was that I found out that my grandfather gave one of his photographs to the father of the nuclear project. There’s a photograph of my grandfather giving his photograph to that guy, and there’s a poem that’s written on the bottom of the photograph, and it’s a reference to Abraham when Abraham was thrown into the fire and flowers bloomed, and that’s one of the verses I used in the collages. It refers to a nationalist poet, Allama Iqbal. So, I’m interested in writing another chapter talking about the photograph itself, and the relation of that quote referring to Abrahamic fire, and this nationalist poet who was censored with this poem, but it is still, somehow, a part of the nationalist imagination.

'In the Name of the Hypersurface of the Present' will be on view at Rubber Factory through November 11. Visit the online gallery here.

All images courtesy of the gallery.

Art

Allen-Golder Dreams of Smoke

March 22, 2024

In their debut solo exhibition in New York, interdisciplinary artist Allen-Golder Carpenter challenges America’s mass consumption of Black culture. Taking its title from a Cities Aviv track of the same name, To Dream of Smoke deals in the aesthetics and objects found within Hip Hop, pop culture and the prison industrial complex.

In their expansive exploration of Black experiences, the Washington D.C. based artist creates sculptural works sourced from the mundane: electric scales, ski masks, Instagram posts, inmate property bags, Domino sugar, screenshots of The Boondocks. The ambitious project includes a sound installation made in collaboration with multi-talented Playboi Carti affiliate Blackhaine and the To Dream of Smoke / 100 Rappers book, a visual study of contemporary rap.

The exhibition is on display at No Gallery in the Lower East Side until April 7th, 2024.

Words by Jard Lerebours
Images courtesy of No Gallery / Allen-Golder Carpenter

With To Dream of Smoke, Allen merges his art practice and love of rap music. He explains the influence of rap on his work, “I love rap music because it's so thick with lingo and many times very regionally specific terminology and accents that I wonder how much someone outside of this music culturally understands when listening?” This question of understanding and viewership is at the center of Allen’s exhibition, the latest entry in Allen’s “Body Surrogate” series which presents and reimagines representational depictions of Black masculinity. His pieces have been exhibited in spaces around the world including Screw Gallery, Galerie Kandlhofer, Von Ammon Co. and Icebox Project Space.

The Race 1, 2023-2024

Allen uses late 2010’s viral rapper Tay K as an entry point to force viewers to confront our complicity in systems that force Black boys into survival tactics. In The Race, he juxtaposes Tay K’s first photo posted from jail with the platinum certification for his song "The Race" aligning them with a shattered hand mirror. The piece shows the disconnect between the commercial success of Tay K’s brief rap career and the broken systems currently shaping his life. He asks us to reconsider the media portrayals of Tay K, “How much can we judge the actions of a child fighting for survival, what if instead of just punishing him, we punished the society that failed him?”

The Race 2, 2024

In The Race 2, Allen takes inspiration from Gil Scott Heron’s “Pieces of a Man" and recreates the photo of Tay K through an assemblage of inmate property inventory bags. In addition, the bags contain a shredded shirt and shattered glass. Using this construction, he visualizes the dehumanization and humiliation that occurs within the United States’ prison system.

Untitled (self portrait), 2024

In Untitled (self portrait), Allen pairs a portrait of Maryland rapper Q Da Fool with a ski mask stretched over a bag of powdered sugar. He tells me about the encounter that inspired the piece, "I used to wear ski masks to try and look tough or unapproachable. One time, someone came right up to me and felt at ease talking to me because of my soft, even sweet eyes”. Through this interrogation of Black masculinity and its performance, Allen questions the desire to appear intimidating in the first place.

I Choose Violence, 2024

In I Choose Violence, Allen draws attention to the mental health crises within the Black community particularly impacting Black men. The piece which consists of photographs and scales is named after the song “I Choose Violence” by Atlanta rapper Glokk40spaz, Allen was inspired by a line in the song where Glokk40spaz alludes to self harm. Allen was taken aback by this break in armor and related through his own struggles around body dysmorphia and an eating disorder. These experiences are aligned in the piece through the grouping of a bathroom scale and digital scale for weighing drugs.

Catch To Dream of Smoke at No Gallery before it goes.

Art

Gerald Lovell Finds Beauty in the Mundane

March 19, 2024

Gerald Lovell isn't trying to make a statement. He rejects the idea that portrayals of Blackness are inherently political. He's simply documenting what happens around him. His latest exhibition, Verde, now showing at PPOW Gallery, captures otherwise fleeting moments of his closest friends and loved ones. However, the self-taught artist is meticulous in their recreations, combining impressionist painting with an impasto technique — both techniques rely on the attention and accumulation of the miniscule.

Lovell takes these seemingly unimportant moments and does what every great artist does best: notices. He pays attention to details that create their own narratives. Whether it's the simplicity of a dinner or the moment of contact in a warm embrace, Lovell immortalizes the ephemera in his canvases. And with Verde, Lovell embarks on a journey of self-discovery through monumental portraits that invited viewers into the depths of his mind.

Text by Sara Eldewak
Images courtesy of PPOW Gallery and Gerald Lovell

Self Portrait (31), 2024

oil on panel 60 x 48 ins.

(LOVELL-086)

Portals (Cala Deià), 2024
oil on panel 60 x 48 ins.
(LOVELL-088)

Born in 1992 in Chicago, IL to Puerto Rican and African American parents — Gerald Lovell began painting professionally at 22, and has been beautifully capturing candid moments ever since. When asked about one of his most intimate pieces, a group portrait featured in the exhibition named Untitled, Lovell calls it “an act of biography." "These are all scenarios in which we're living.” The moments that he captures are universal, and there's a palpable sense of tenderness in the communal aspect of his candids.

Discussing his perspective as an artist, he emphasized the importance of embracing his subjects, "I'm meditating on things we may take for granted. Traveling, eating, friends, I cherish it all." It's clear when speaking to him that painting gives him a sense of purpose, and that his work is deeply personal, “Everyone I paint is a friend of mine.” From a friend to the hit Hulu series The Bear, his list of references is encyclopedic and expansive. He praises The Bear's capability to beautify simple moments in the kitchen like cutting vegetables, or even decorating a plate reminds him of painting. “Restaurants are feeding you an experience, and I'd like to do the same in my work."

Ant on His Patio, 2024

oil on panel 72 x 60 ins.

(LOVELL-083)

Lovell finds the majesty in moments that are like any other. From intimate portraits of friends grilling, as seen in Ant on his Patio, to images of strangers committed to memory, it's evident that Lovell uses painting as a form of therapy and sacred outlet that allows him to access memories hidden in his mind. It was evident while speaking with him that his work is handled with care, and an extrospective view of the people and world around him.

Untitled (Christian's Birthday), 2023

oil on panel 72 x 60 ins.

(LOVELL-080)

To just capture everyday life and value it because it was lived, in the most honest way possible.

Waiting I, 2023

oil on panel 24 x 24 ins.

(LOVELL-079)

Daria, 2024 oil on panel

72 x 60 ins.

(LOVELL-084)

Art

Oda Jaune on Transformation, Divine Femininity and Magic in 'Miss Understand'

At the core of “Miss Understand” is a celebration of the divine feminine, or the spark that birthed humanity into existence, as well as a profound respect and admiration for the resilience of women to embrace the multidimensionality of their identities from within a society that has historically limited their agency to do so. She achieves this by masterfully invoking a visual language of repeating symbols: eyes, lit candles, fleshy body parts, serpents, and Barbies, etc. that seemingly invites the viewer to try and connect the dots while at the same time resisting the very idea that there is a rational or logical way to view or experience life or the exhibition. "Miss Understand" was on view at Templon Gallery in NYC through March 9th, 2024.

Emann Odufu: It took me a while to process the exhibition. I was initially overwhelmed by that level of detail. I was at the exhibition in the installation space with some friends, and we heard a humming noise coming from a box. It took us a second to realize that the box was a refrigerator. We opened it up, and there were apples in the fridge.

It wasn't until I started to look at Miss Understand as a character that I began to see her not as a representation of you solely as an artist but as a holistic representation of femininity in the modern world that I began to wrap my head around the exhibition. Miss Understand felt like a play on Miss Universe and every woman. My first question is for you, the artist, who is Miss Understand?

Oda Jaune: I’m so happy that you opened the door of the refrigerator. When I was working on the installation, I loved to imagine the viewer to experience the exhibition with their eyes and hands and to lie down on the bed, sit on the chairs, discover the overpainted books, and spend time in the space so they become part of the installation themselves.

“Miss Understand” is not a particular woman. It is not me. It is no woman and at the same time maybe every woman. It’s also for everybody who feels like a woman. I came up with the title on a walk with my daughter. We were looking at people's T-shirts because there was often a slogan written on them. She asked me if I had to design a t-shirt with only text, what would it be. The first thing that came to my mind was “Miss Understand” and I said that I would divide the word into two.

It's something in the nature of the woman that it is impossible to be understood. Extending it further, I think it’s in the nature of a human to not to be understood. How absurd is it to me that we are living in a time of so many numbers, facts, algorithms and scientific proofs that bring us further away from (our) nature. We're forgetting about magic and things that are not so easy to understand. When you have the feeling and understand something, you put it in a box, label it and maybe you get a key and close the file forever and say “Oh, this is this way” and you are limiting yourself. I feel almost allergic to the idea of labeling the world, people, history, everything that we try to put in a box.

Within the work there may be questions for the viewer, for their answers to arise but they don't need to position themselves and don't need to judge. Our world is so polarized. You must choose left or right, for or against, which constantly puts us in separation and division. How about making it more open for us to make mistakes and for misunderstandings and more freedom?

EO: I think that that makes a lot of sense. I saw that throughout the show, there's this idea of subverting duality or this idea that in the process of misunderstanding, there's this sort of mystery that is confronted and acknowledged. As the viewer, you see the exhibition and try to make sense of it all, but try as you may, you won't see it from the vantage point of you, the artist, and It's almost futile to try to understand.

I want to talk about the performance art piece happening on the show's last day, which I'm excited to see, and where you will animate Miss Understand in a personified form. As an artist, I love that you dig into the multidisciplinary aspect of your practice and constantly push the limitations of how you engage with your audience. I read that in the last show at Templon in Paris, you had a hologram of the Tree of Life, and now you're activating this current exhibition through performance art. Can you talk about how you're constantly reinventing your practice and your approach to toggling between these various mediums as you engage your audience?

OJ: I love that you found information and the little journey that I had with the hologram. I loved it because it was the pandemic, and the real situation where we could reset individually and as a society. I was asking existential questions, and I thought about how we're living in a world that is, for me, even though it's so dominated by inventions of our time, it is still quite magical. It's almost like another reality within our reality. I was working on this show during covid lockdown thinking about how there’s something invisible you couldn't see, you know it's in the air. I found it fascinating that we were in such a frenzy over something invisible and how it could, for a moment, change everything in our world. This thought process around visible and invisible, tangible and translucent, leads to an interest in holograms. The more I researched, I understood that I would have to create my own technique for creating a hologram, because the best things happen when you have a limited budget.

I said “OK, let's think about what we can do if we improvise.” So we created something, and it actually worked. It was like magic because we didn't have much, and it was such an improvisation and the people who loved it from all age groups were touched by it. For me, it's about how real I can make an idea and what techniques permit me to execute those visions.

I was trained as a painter and when I was younger, I really loved observing the human body. I thought it's just so incredible. Humans in general. I really love nature and observing the light and the shadow and how everything changes constantly. I honestly don't remember a moment in my life when I have been bored. What a stunning experience it is having eyes. Painting oil on canvas is the closest I can come to what I have as a vision. At some point, I reached a stage where I can paint everything that I imagine, so I created sculpture to see how I would feel when my ideas become three dimensional. When I was a young girl, I loved working with clay, the softness of it. I was also intrigued by wood and stone, marble but then I was told that, because I was a woman, I would only be able to work on small things because physically I would never be able to do what men can. I accepted that and focused on painting. Because I wanted to be as free as possible as an artist and I do love painting in an unconventional way, but I didn’t stop loving sculptures, so later I reapproached sculpture again.

One day, my daughter asked me if I wasn’t a painter what I would do in my next life. I realized that I would love to do movies, but I want to do movies that I only need to do myself. That's why there are six short videos in the exhibition and I loved making them.

EO: I'm also a filmmaker, and when I was in the installation, I thought that as I looked at the videos, whether you are shooting the videos with a crew or you're shooting them yourself.

Alone. I really love making films, combining pictures and sounds. The whole thing is moving. With painting, you have just one shot. A study found that visitors look for less than two seconds, turn and read the explanatory text for an additional 10 seconds and then move on. So, you have to decide which moment to paint and that takes months and months in order to make a difference in a span of seconds.

EO: And now you're venturing into performance art.

OJ: I am very excited though about the performance art piece because Claudia is a very special human being that I love as a dear friend. One day, she showed me something with her hands and the way she moved her finger in a way to symbolize humans, it was like a symphony, and I imagined it as a whole movie. I asked her if she wanted to collaborate for the exhibition. I love to imagine what she is going to do and love not knowing what is going to happen on that day. It’s the same with all of my paintings. When I start painting, I never know what's going to happen. What I dream of is creating a feeling of “Miss Understand “ being a real human - only the feeling that was at the core of our collaboration for the performance you are going to see on the final last day of the show. The aim was to put this feeling in a real human that will grow and materialize itself in a living, moving, breathing, heart beating woman inside the gallery space for 8 hours existing as real as every one of us. Claudia will be performing and the viewer can enter the space and decide how close and involved they want to be. Claudia Hilda is for me one of the most incredible artists with that one of a kind ability to become a pure feeling by giving up on all she is, on all knowledge and abilities, techniques and styles she has, the language, the speech to become Miss Understand.

EO: There is a quality of artistic rebellion in your work that I enjoy. Both aesthetically and with the symbols you use very well. The viewer's experience of your work has been described as deciphering a crossword puzzle, a complex web of various cues that appear from out of your subconscious and that force the viewer to confront their relation to the world and their internal belief systems. Miss Understand does not exist in a vacuum and builds on a visual language you have built throughout your career. It's a language only you speak, but the viewer can feel it. As an artist, how did you come to know yourself in such a way that you can render your subconscious into a visual language that people can feel?

OJ: I don't know but I'm going to search for an answer to give you. The thing I can tell you is that I can't work if there is somebody else around me. If there is someone else in the studio, I never reach the concentration that I need to forget the outside world. I start with something that moves me. There are certain things where there is a longing. Something I am deeply moved by, something I can’t find peace with unless I can transform it and bring it to the other side.

It doesn’t even need to be politics; it can be something like how we come into this world without choosing where and when you are dropped here and then you deal with it and then on top of that you're going to be taken away at a certain moment. Maybe this is what I really don't like as a feeling, probably like all of us I don’t like the feeling of fear or the feeling of not being able to change things or that I don’t have any power to make a change. In a way, I search for a way to deal with the reality of what is really happening in the world with eyes wide open. I reject closing them. These things move me and touch me, and I want to fight. I did start as a child with the dream to change the world. I suppose painting was my tool.

When I was 12, I moved to Germany. I could not speak the language and the kids were kind of cruel and thought I was stupid. I really couldn't express myself, I just had the basics. So, I started drawing to communicate and it worked. They were able to understand me. In this moment, I saw how many things you can say with an image. If you think of all the emojis that we send and how one heart emoji has thousands of words inside of it and there is something so open about it.

When I was a child I loved going to the library, and I would search for books with images, and I spent hours and hours and I would “read" through observing images. So, I think it's the way I get the most information. I believe my ideas come from tapping into my subconscious. It’s through the subconscious that everything comes. Your subconscious is working for you during the day and night when you're not conscious. It's a huge sea of everything and it has its own intelligence. For many centuries people believed a lot more in this other part of our intelligence and it’s a lot less respected these days. Today we are more confident about the visible things, the rational, the facts that can be scientifically proven. However, there is some truth on the other side and when I reach the point of being in tune with it, it is usually in the morning. I just love silence when I'm alone. I always start quite disciplined and controlled, but there comes the moment where all this control is lost and I’m working and not hungry and I don't know how fast time goes by, this is the most precious time and that is where the important decisions take place.

Someone told me you are born many times in your life, and you also die many times in your life and I love that, but I wanted to talk about the very first time.

EO: Birth and creation ( to ourselves, to the other, to the world) is a strong theme in your practice In this exhibition we see the connection to Birth through your depictions of the womb and pink fleshy matter, most prominently in your work entitled "M is for Mother". It's also seen in your depiction or cap nod to the biblical creation story and how that has shaped the perception of women in modern culture. Can you reflect on this theme of Birth and Creation and how it's a thread carried throughout your practice and even into your artistic philosophy?

OJ: Someone told me you are born many times in your life, and you also die many times in your life and I love that, but I wanted to talk about the very first time. The biggest painting in the show M for Mother, is about coming to earth, dedicated to the one that gave us life, the biggest present, to the mother. We often think we have freedom of choice in life, but the biggest choice has been done for us, it is not done by ourselves. What happens? Where do we come from? It all begins with pain, the first breath you take on earth is painful and your mother will be in such pain. They say that when you're born several times in your life very often it happens after a very difficult situation and you're able to start a new life. One of the most dramatic things that can happen in life is having a chance to be reborn, reinvent yourself, to reset and start new. Many of the paintings capture moments of change or transformation. You have someone of something becoming something else.

EO: One great example is "B, like Barbie."

OJ: Yes, B like Barbie is also about that. I had many barbies when I was a child and when I started painting this painting, I had no idea there would be a movie about it and it had nothing to do with that. When I was in New York, I went to see it, but I found that I just really wanted to fall asleep. I didn't watch it until the end, but what I did see was this constantly beautiful young plastic doll. But you are never the same. Depending on how you feel, how much sun you have taken in, how healthy you are, what you ate, how you slept, how much water you drink, you are never the same. Even after you go to sleep, your mind and feelings are still active because you had certain dreams that you might forget on the next day, but you change. Regardless if you forget your dreams, you are still altered by them. You are not the same. So this idea of one-dimensionality is problematic. Birth is something to be so grateful for and it is important to never forget that. At a certain point, there is so much thinking of who I am and not of how I have been born.