At least from my perspective, the process seems more glamorous than it actually is. Is it difficult sometimes?
I mean, it’s very interesting. I feel like there’s a real unique element about us—just how we were friends first and are now working together, all eight of us. It all comes down to managing being in different places in the world and in life, yet coming together and staying on the same page with one another to build shows. When we’re together, we work so well. We get all of our different ideas vetted out during the preliminary stages. Once we're actually in the space, we’ll put a piece on the wall and just let it kind of hang for a bit, and then maybe put another one somewhere else. Or if someone feels something, they’ll just pick up a piece and put it on the wall. It’s not like there’s this intense layout. When it comes to curating, people are always impressed at how we work together like that.
Where does the clothing line fall in all of this? Did it just feel like the next step?
It just comes down to how you utilize eight people to the max. We have people who studied product design, architecture, and certain fine arts stuff. I have a communications and marketing background, so it’s not like I’m classically art-trained. And it was an interest of ours to further the branding, so what better way to do it than through products that reflect our lifestyles and interests? If we have the skillsets, then why not do it? But we’re very sensitive as to where the different aspects of Auto Body are positioned. You have products, but are you this clothing company, art group, or what?
That’s where the t-shirts came in. The “shop” tee came first, and that one was super basic and had our address on the back and a tag on the front. Then we moved onto a long sleeve tee from there that had “Auto Body” on it. Not everyone in NYC is going to know about Auto Body, but we can bring those shirts into the city and give them to our friends, and then you start seeing them around town. Another cool thing for products is that when we work with people, we like to give them a shoutout or tie them into our network because community is such a big thing for us. We’ll do these “friends and family” products and put logos of everybody we’ve worked with in the past couple months (or would like to work with in the future) on them as these sort of aspirational wishes. We’ve done a backgammon set, beach bags, floating keychains... It’s just further ways of branding, basically.
What are your standards in terms of choosing what you want to showcase? I know you can’t showcase everything.
That’s another interesting process. We’ll have people we’ve seen around or would like to show in the future on our backburner. And then when a show comes up, especially now that we’re using environmental spaces and stuff like that, we’ll think, “What artist fits this context?” And then we’ll find the space and kind of piece it together then, or maybe we’ll have a cluster of artists we want to have, and the show won’t happen with them until a few months or after a couple other shows because they haven’t been the right fit so far. But once the time is right, we’ll use them. We have a huge network of people in the community, so it’s whatever fits best for the show pretty much.
For the most part, people have genuinely been down to be a part of us. We’re not really competition for anyone in the city. There is no, “Oh, I’ve shown at this gallery, so I can’t show at this one because they’re right down the block.” We’re out on Long Island, so we’re in this zone where we get that freedom to work with people who maybe have a certain exclusivity complex.
What does it take to be a member of Auto Body?
I think it’s just drawing from your environment. It’s funny. We had to fill out bios for the Parrish show, and every single one of us wrote the word “nature” in the bio. So you can see that we’re all on the same page. Even though we were all in our own worlds writing them, everyone tied into that somehow, which I thought was very telling of who we are and why we are all together in that way.
What are the next steps for Auto Body? How are you going to take this to the next level?
I would say the next step for us is doing another summer of satellite shows. Getting a future space, whether we make it on our own or not, and building it as this sort of institution would also be the next step. We always reference the Dia Art Foundation and these destinations of art where they have these amazing exhibitions and shows. I think we’d really like to further our presence in Bellport and make it a legitimate, incredible entity.
