Mark Whalen: "I am Just Here"

Places and Spaces was born from a conviction that space is never neutral. It is always charged, contested, alive, and shaped as much by memory, myth, and imagination as by architecture or geography. That idea emerged gradually as I began to realize how artists today are not just making objects, they are building worlds. They draw from layered histories, lived experience, and speculative possibility to shift how we understand the environments we inhabit. Bringing together the artists in this exhibition creates a field where distinct practices echo across mediums and contexts. Textiles speak to paint, myth speaks to memory, code speaks to clay, and emerging gestures sit beside established ones. Each artist adds a fragment to a larger atlas that maps the ways we construct place and how those constructions, in turn, shape us.

My recent three part conversation with Suchitra, Matsu, and Umar for Office extends the spirit of this show. Their practices span different mediums and moments in their careers, yet their voices resonate with one another in surprising ways. Together with the other artists in the exhibition, they contribute to a constellation that opens new spaces for dialogue, imagination, and possibility.

Tomokazu Matsuyama

EO: Your painting Color of the City No.48 is more compact in scale compared to some of your

monumental works, yet it still carries your signature layering of patterns, cultural fragments, and

symbols. What does working at this scale allow you to express about “space” that might differ from your larger canvases?

TM: Even in a smaller format, I try to hold onto the same density of references that runs through my bigger works. What really shifts is how viewers experience the space. A large canvas can surround you, almost like stepping into another environment, while a smaller piece feels more like a direct conversation. In Color of the City, the scale does not reduce the complexity, it accentuates it. The fragments of  patterns, portraits,  cultural symbols like “the East and West”, sit closer together so the tension between them becomes more immediate.  For me, that compression mirrors how space is lived in cities like New York; crowded, layered, and full of unexpected proximities.

EO: Your recent solo exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art grappled directly with the idea of space; particularly the tension between interior and exterior, and the line between private and public environments. How do those investigations of space carry forward into your contribution to Places & Spaces?

TM: At SCAD, I was very conscious of how works lived simultaneously inside the museum and in the Jewel Boxes that face directly onto the street. That duality; contemplative interior space versus the unpredictability of public encounter, reflects the way I want my paintings to breathe. In Places & Spaces, that same investigation continues, but in a different context. My contribution engages with the exhibition’s idea that space is not just backdrop, but something charged, contested, and psychological. The layering in my work destabilizes boundaries. In them ornament meets politics, intimacy at times collides with spectacle. By doing this, I hope the paintings remind us that “space” isn’t neutral. It carries memory, exclusion, and possibility. Whether compact or monumental, public or private, the works are about inhabiting that unsettled in-between space.

EO: Both your practice and another artist in Places and Spaces, Dennis Osadebe, highlight the duality of tradition and modernity; history and contemporary culture exist in constant dialogue. How do you approach this balance in your own work, and what possibilities do you see in navigating that tension as part of your visual language? Also, why is it important to look forward as well as backward when envisioning new possibilities for the world we live in?

TM: I have always moved between cultures, Japan and the U.S., tradition and pop culture, being both insider and outsider in different contexts. I do not see history and modernity as opposites, I let them speak to each other. A kimono pattern might sit beside a Renaissance motif or an image from streetwear, showing how meaning shifts when they share space. Looking back matters because history holds unresolved questions of identity, justice, and belonging. But looking forward is just as important, since art must imagine futures not limited by what we inherit. For me, layering fragments creates a language of coexistence. It honors the past while opening space for something unexpected, reminding us the future is always built from what came before

Suchitra Mattai

EO: In Places & Spaces, your works Poesis and Strength in Numbers merge recycled saris, vintage sculpture, and historic prints into layered, tactile constellations. How do these materials function as both personal memory and cultural architecture, and in what ways do you see them resonating with the exhibition’s theme of “nested realities”?

SM: "Poesis" combines a found bust seemingly from the western art historical canon and braids that are woven from worn saris, in essence, from deconstructed fabrics that still bear traces of the bodies they once adorned.  Collectively, as the show's narrative suggests, the two materials occupy "spaces [that] fold onto themselves," positing a new goddess of a future sacred land.  The juxtapositions not only collapse time, but also the spaces of art/craft, public/domestic, and East/West geographies and iconographies. Similarly, "Strength in numbers," a collage made of paint and historic materials, depicts figures from various times and places.  Colonial men cut from antique book pages engage in "battle" while sari clad women intervene and a girl gallops away.  Migration stories and ancestral histories begin, end and refresh.  The work is meant to hold multiple perspectives on the past at once.  Here, combined "nested realities" generate new stories filled with hope. 

EO:  At the São Paulo Biennial, you’ve created an expansive installation that transforms everyday textiles into a sweeping exploration of migration, memory, and belonging. How does that body of work connect to the more intimate yet equally layered pieces you’ve contributed to Places & Spaces? Also, what was it like showing and being in conversation with the works of Sir Frank Bowling; it felt like a very special moment for Guyanese artists and for the recognition of Guyanese art within a larger art historical context.

SM: "Siren Song" at the São Paulo Biennial is a portal within a portal in a way.  The cylindrical form made of suspended tapestries creates a space for the viewer to enter.  Once inside, a combination of ocean waves, a projection of the ocean on the ceiling and the warmth of hundreds of braided saris form a womb.  The work offers us a space to rest, to reflect and to collectively heal.  Though the scale shifts, spaces continue to meld, separate and disorient.

It was a truly auspicious moment to share space with the inimitable Sir Frank Bowling. His painting of a borderless South America really struck me, especially in this moment.  I believe that this was his first time exhibiting in South America, (as it was mine), in this land of our respective births. It brought me to tears to have Guyana included in this way and is a testament to the curatorial team's intentions as evoked by the Biennial's title "Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice."  I continue to reflect on early discussions with Keyna Eleison, co-curator at large, about ideas as estuaries and the many literal and figurative rivers that flow through Guyana.

EO:  Many artists in Places & Spaces, from Chelsea Odufu to Ivan Forde to Sarah Mecca Abdourahman, explore the role of materials in shaping meaning. Do you see your practice as part of this wider movement of reclaiming and reanimating material histories?

SM: Yes. Materials hold so much meaning. They tell stories of families and their histories, of our differences and connections.  To use materials that were once part of our ancestors' lives is an act of celebration of those who were once rendered invisible.  It is an act of defiance that brightens our path forward and allows us to manifest the future we desire.

Umar Rashid

EO: Your works in Places & Spaces, Bust of a Company Cazador Soldier and Klaatu Barada Nikto (Stop Barbarism), extend your mytho-historical universe into three-dimensional form. I first noticed your sculptural work at your solo show at MoMA PS1 in 2023, and thought it would be exciting to highlight this lesser-known medium in your practice within the context of this show. What possibilities do you see sculpture opening up that your paintings alone cannot?

UR: Thank you!  I can’t wait to make more sculptures and installations in the future!  At the moment, I’m keeping things simple because I don’t want to outpace my paintings and drawings. I’m in no competition with anyone. I will allow my sculptures to evolve naturally within my personal ecosystem. 

EO: The show’s title, Places & Spaces, is an obvious nod to Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place. Central to the exhibition is the idea of reserving space for mythology, fantasy, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction; elements that course through your practice, but also resonate in works in the show by Delano Dunn and Kiyomi Quinn Taylor. Could you delve into the specific characters embodied in your two sculptures in the show, and explain their place within your broader mythology?

UR: As it has been stated before, my practice began in the colonial era but expanded to encompass past, present, and future. The Cuaulhocelotl (Aztec elite jaguar warrior) was incorporated from the pre-Cortez Mexican Empire and remade into an elite unit of infantry I call the Company Cazador. They often appear in my narratives about post colonial North America and there is nothing necessarily “cosmic “ about them but, they are present in the story to represent the mingling of the “old” and “new” ways and how warfare, at the time (colonial) was reconstructed to include elements from a forcibly, shared history. Klaatu Barada Nikto (the Sentinel) however, came from my early childhood experience with the science fiction film, The Day The Earth Stood Still. A film that I love dearly and is quite relevant today among these internecine wars of muddled political policy, actual war, and the destruction of the environment. The Sentinel is a reminder and a warning from a possible future that forces humanity to abandon our destructive policies and practices, lest we be destroyed. 

EO: This exhibition also becomes a space to engage history. I’ve long felt that both your work and Suchitra Mattai’s embody a kind of “critical fabulation,” reconstructing historical narratives in ways that trouble the idea of fact. Do you see your work as actively reframing what is accepted in the historical canon, and if so, how do you think about that responsibility as part of your storytelling?

UR: In the cacophony of noise about “changing history to suit one’s needs and desires “ I fore saw this reaction and thus went a different route, into the realm of critical fabulation. While also unearthing untold stories that don’t fit the narrative of the conquerors and subsequently, the overlords of the present, I liberally sprinkled doses of fantasy within my narrative to avoid the unhelpful quibbling about how changing elements in a heavily redacted historical record would be inauthentic and thus dangerous.  I wholeheartedly reject this notion. As I am not omniscient (nor is anyone else), my duty to myself and others is to explore all that I can within this brief lifetime, synthesize it, and make it into a story that constantly changes our perceptions of our shared experiences on this planet.  Inspired greatly by many historical thinkers, warriors, poets, and everyday people, I set out on a lonely journey to influence the world I live in and the world I want.