Exiled from Babylon

How should we listen to Score, for Ellipsis & Roundtable if at all?

I’m not sure if there is a proper way to listen to Score; it’s just a meek ambient sound that is meant to re-enact that white noise of when you’re waiting for things. In this work, the constant dialogue that is hallmark to AM radio starts to become more like an opaque wall of chatter, which makes this aversion to dead air super palpable. That adage of not being able to "get a word in edgewise" is central here. I have always been interested in seemingly impenetrable borders, especially when it comes to cultural exchange. In this case, I wanted to play with the one thing that AM radio seems to be allergic to, which is music, but a flimsy, hyper-analog version of it.

Score, for Ellipsis & Roundtable, 2024

Zip-Liiiiiine, 2024

Zip-Liiiiiine is cute! Do gallery-goers step over him?

For the most part, no. However, I do like that the authoritative function of stanchion is now endowed to this silly little sloth performing as an art object. I wanted to double down on the pliability of the stanchions with something that was dubiously heavy, à la a sloth plushie filled with gravel. Like giving the thing different terms it never possessed — let’s call it slothiness in the expanded field, haha. I also think the titular gesture of elongating the word “line” really stupidly captures these conditions of ambivalence and anachronism that are central here. 

Tell me more about the giant wallpaper depicting the Statue of Liberty! What was the process of searching for the perfect Statue of Liberty picture on Getty Images like?

That specific wall in the gallery always felt like an image of itself and I wanted to revert it back to just being a wall, using a free image of freedom and stanchions. So we prioritize the dimensions of the wall with this poor image, with no real concern for its fidelity. Shoutout to Louise Lawler! As per the actual selection of images, I really wanted that specific shade of navy sky where it’s unclear whether it’s the beginning or end of the day. Let’s call it Schrödinger’s atmosphere: within this image, liberty toggles between AM and PM much in the vein of how bureaucracy maintains its 24/7 operations. 

Grey's Foreclosure, 2024

The foreclosures are quite uncanny. What was your inspiration for them?

The foreclosures reference boarded up windows, which I’ve always enjoyed in that they tend to reassert the scale of cover-up — when you see a boarded up house and you’re reminded how big brownstones really can get — and elicit speculation, the type where the worst-case scenario is the first thought. They’re these sexy NPC placeholder-objects that have a very seductive type of opacity, the type of surface most akin to those animatronic sculptures you would see in Chuck E. Cheese. I’ve always understood plasticity as a good surrogate for performativity, or lack thereof. 

Which content house spooked you more? New York or Los Angeles?

I think I am equally ambivalent towards both places, though I will say I have some level of Stockholm syndrome with New York. I feel most myself when I’m here, but feeling like yourself all the time is so exhausting. But all that California sunshine and manifest-destiny flavor of square footage can really melt your brain. This is probably a fitting framework to think through the content house as a site of cultural overproduction and the different types of excess that that has generated. In my head, the NY-excess reads more like an image that constantly preemptively documents itself; the LA-excess feels like some bad volumetrics, like those stilted megahomes that are built on mountainsides–just something I’m still thinking through.

What is the relationship between the big mascot and the small mascots? Are they a family? And why sperms?

Formally, they’re laid out in a way that prompts a left-to-right orientation. It’s this mother-duck-ducklings kind of queueing. On the other hand though, the little sperms being 3D-printed and serialized speaks to manufacture and prototyping. One may read this queue of sperms as “attempts” towards the big sperm. A trail mix of nuts that either shoot out from or lead to the big nut! The sperm is this naughty proxy for artistic production and reproduction. The punch line here is the male, genius trope. I wanted to smother it with this inbred assembly line of cultural archetypes.

I like invoking family because it sets up reproduction (I love you so we must build a life together) in tandem with preservation (I love us so we must continue our namesake). It’s also something that everyone is complicit in, with and without their consent, for better and for worse. This is a fitting model for artistic production/cultural participation.

Both Smokin' Tiki and Chair with Pipe feel intimate and absurd. How do you balance the two affects in your works?

Not to do some cheap poetry here, but I think to engage in any level of intimacy requires some faith in the absurd. It feels odd to involve oneself in any type of attachment, regardless of how often or how much you might want to. So maybe it’s more apt to call it flailing between the two, in a concerted effort to safely experience precarity. The world loves to impede on and snuff out our desire for change, so you kind of have to gamify your position and aspirations in order to counter that.

Chair with Pipe, 2024

Big Mascot (Ragamuffin), 2024

I love the honesty of Incubator! Sincerity in self-criticism is rare these days. How do you keep up?

The usual image of “keeping up” sounds a bit impressive and affirmative for my liking–I have way more faith in my own pettiness. And I say pettiness to foreground this antagonism inscribed within Incubator. It’s the gallery’s storage room, and you can’t spell “storage” without “stage.” The monolithic lamp inside flickers arbitrarily like a thunderstorm, which is bolstered by this 2-way mirror that is surfaced with false raindrops when you look through. Imagine there was a weather machine in the Kapp Kapp storage? It all works to dramatize inventory, the tragicomedy of “stuff”. 

I was thinking of storage as the art object’s equivalent of a commons: intensive care unit meets daycare facility meets town hall meets morgue. Yet the storage room remains hidden. So it felt proper to stage some of my past work in this voyeuristic game, which maybe one could call “sincerity.” Again, I return to pettiness.