Under the Scalpel with Panteha Abareshi

Can you talk a bit about your latest residency with Human Resources?

The residency itself is called the Time, Space and Money Residency. It’s been almost exactly a year since my last solo show, HIPAA Violations, so it’s interesting to note how markedly different my work is now. So much of the past was about imbuing my own identity into performance pieces. Now, instead of exploring illness as it relates to my body, this latest project is more a study of The Body—capital T, capital B—and its abstraction. I’m trying to approach this expression of the human body as defunct, restrictive, and inherently violent idea—from a place removed from references of my own hyper specific emotions and memories.

What does that look like in your work now?

I’m doing more sculpture—a lot of my past work involved integrating medical ephemera used on my body, and turning that into sculpture—whereas now I’m actually fabricating things. Specifically taking medical devices, like mobility aids, and taking them apart and making them into new things. So, still in the same vein that I was doing it before, where I'm using all sorts of medical materials. The difference is now I'm actually turning them into materials instead of recontextualizing them into sculptures.

How do you integrate violence into your performance pieces?

The idea of brutality and violence is so deeply rooted in my work. I think that violence is in every part of language; it's written into the way that we are intimate with one another, in the ways that we have standards around care. Even separated from illness—separated from the body as something that's experiencing violence at the hands of the the Western medical world or at the hands of its own biological system attacking itself— but completely removed from all of that, just being able to acknowledge that humans are so inherently emotionally carnivorous. I want to be able to express that without it being moralistically tainted, it's not about whether it's right or that it's wrong, it's beyond that.

Do you mind talking about how anger functions within the process?

Definitely. For a long time there was so much anger behind everything that my body was experiencing and is still experiencing. I felt really inclined to create pieces where I was basically just telling the audience that they had to sit there and endure what I was going to show them and that it was going to be really uncomfortable for both of us, for everyone involved. They just had to shut up and take it basically. Most of my first video and performance pieces were so tangibly violent. Not only violence against my own body, but I was also bringing in archival footage of surgeries and these really grotesque sort of things that are unquestionably difficult for some people to watch. There was even a particular performance piece where I burried myself under scalpels that I ended up catching a lot of slack for.

You talk a lot about being monitored and probed. How does the gaze, medical or otherwise, affect your work?

Yeah, the medical gaze is interesting because I have so little distance from it, regardless of how truly critical I am. I'll be making a piece tapping into the emotional anguish of hospitalization and then, boom, I'll be hospitalized the next day and I'll lose two weeks in the hospital. I'll come out and I'll go back to that piece and I'll be like, no, no, no, it's all wrong. I have to completely redo this. There's a collapse of the boundaries between my bodily autonomy and the medical complex, so there's practically no way to exist right now in the United States with a life threatening degenerative illness in a way that you are not absolutely trapped under the thumb of doctors and big pharma. I'm still learning every day the ways in which not only am I being surveilled, but that I'm surveilling myself and that people in my life are surveilling me.

There’s a proliferation of the term ‘body’ in the art world— ‘black bodies,’ ‘disabled bodies,’ ‘queer bodies,’ etc. What is your relationship to the term? Is it dehumanizing?

I think that we are so comfortable with using the word body when talking about blackness, queerness, transness, all these things, because to objectify the other is also written into our language super conveniently. When I say “body” I am fully referring to my body as a proper noun, like an object. There is no purpose in denying the fact that there is such an immense amount of objectification that my body is going through. I always have to capitalize The Body because it's something that I'm observing and collecting data from. It’s so much more than just being inside of it.

Violence is in every part of language—it's written into the way that we are intimate with one another, in the way we have standards around care.

I understand that with your condition, you have a shortened life expectancy. How does that awareness affect your work?

Since I was about 5, I was first made aware of the fact that I would be dying young, so growing up in the medical complex has removed any rose-tint about the matter. In a lot of cases, especially when my health is the worst, death is a comfort. There's nothing more comforting to me than the finality of life. I’ve medically died and been resuscitated roughly 5 times now. So “recovery” or resuscitation is such a nuanced concept, because dying was such an innately peaceful experience that I don’t want to return to my body when it happens.

Are you comfortable talking about your experience dying?

Yeah totally. Again, I’m pretty detached about death, but essentially they overdosed me on painkillers just trying to treat my pain. They just titrate it too high and then all of a sudden I'm code blue. My heart is stopped. It's like there is nothing, every time it has happened. It’s so hard to articulate the feeling of literally being brought back into a body that is so hostile and just wishing that you didn't have to be.

So what place does death occupy for you in your life?

My relationship to death now is so tied to other people, it's not even about me at all. Death is about my father—the thought of my father outliving me makes me so sad because I know that that would devastate him. And so when I end up talking about death, it's always like a conversation about love. It sounds saccharine. But it's like that. It's true. It’s true.

You’ve talked about the separation you experience of the mind and the body. According to your belief system, where that does that leave the soul?

As I've gotten older I've had to reconcile that gap between body, mind and soul. For me, it's the hyper evolved part of the human mind that is so lost in its vast consciousness. That is what the soul is to me. It's that space, that cavern between body and mind where I have to be just to like survive the pain to survive it every day. The concept of the soul ties so much into the holistic thought process that I had to develop around pain just to survive it. It's a place down. Very, very, very, very down. That's where it exists for me. I wouldn’t use the word soul, but it's that's where real consciousness is.

There's nothing more comforting to me than the finality of life. I’ve medically died and been resuscitated roughly 5 times now.

Just to close, do you have any upcoming shows or projects we should keep an eye out for?

Yes! I have a solo show at the Barnsdale Museum here in LA in February. It's going to debut first digitally, then half way through the show it'll open physically at a limited capacity.

Thank you for your time. This was a fascinating interview.

Thank you, I really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate being able to talk about these topics with someone I trust.

Art

Rediscovering Statues

Art

"Bad Girls" Make Their Mark

As Diaz shares in an essay that introduces the exhibition: “The anesthetic flash of the shutter freezes time and brings the doll a second from death so she can stake claim. Whatever is achieved in a photograph is hers. Here’s the proof.”

Bad Girls is an exhibition about queer and trans expression, about the bonds of platonic intimacy – just see Martine and Dara (Fire Island) – and an exploration into one’s relationship with sensuality and bodily freedom. \

A particularly special portion of the show manifests in the solemn gaze of Fern Cerezo in Premiere and Audition. The self portraits, in which the figure wears both skin-tight garments and a wedding-style gown in the respective photographs, greet viewers at the front of the gallery with a solemn gaze. The works are complexified by the fact that Cerezo does not allow themselves to be photographed by virtually anyone. These portraits are a practice in image ownership and reclamation, and a testament to the trust that Diaz’s artists put in her for this curatorial project.

Aside from Cerezo, the exhibition also features works from Drake Carr, Sebastian Acero, Jan Anthonio Diaz, Chuy Medina, Jessica Sofia Mitrani, Rey Rivera, and Cruz Valdez in a melee of self-portraits, on-location produced content, and slices of life that include the curator smiling in repose at Fort Tilden Beach.

LEFT: Sebastian Acero, Cruz, 2024. Polaroid collage. Framed dimensions: 18.375 x 15.4375 in. Edition of 1.

RIGHT: Jan Anthonio Diaz, Mother and Son, 2024. RGB print. 20 x 24 in. Framed dimensions: 22.625 x 30.4375 in. Edition of 3

The project was born out of a wealth of influences, many of them literary. In a show preview, Diaz explores Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of The Flowers (“a very brutal story of queer, gay, and trans people that is somehow very optimistic,”) as well as Camilla Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls, a chronicle of a group of trans sex workers in Córdoba, Argentina.

In fact, the pink house in Genet’s work is an influence for the shade that drapes the walls of the space of the show. Perhaps the gallery stands as a reimagined version of the book’s residence, a 21st century homage to the lyrical text and queer-forward messaging of the work.

Midway through our viewing, a subject of one of the works (Sebastian Acero’s Stroke featuring Karmi Pinning) drops by to hand off a corset for Diaz’s opening night ensemble. She takes one look at a photo of Crystal Renn in naked, elegant posture wearing the aforementioned shoe sculpture and gasps: “This is so gag, so major,” she says. A five-minute snapshot in pre-show logistical acrobatics, it exemplifies the place that this show holds in culture for its subjects, curator, and viewers. At OCDChinatown, a community-oriented ship steered by a fearless leader, coterie of talented artists and subjects, and commitment to a vision unleashed in force await a viewing public. How breathless, how perfect, and certainly unmissable.

Bad Girls will be on view at OCDChinatown until December 8th, 2024.

Art

Oscar yi Hou Sets Reality Center Stage

October 30, 2024

New York painter Oscar yi Hou enjoyed the kind of early success that makes cynics salivate. Downtown art dealer James Fuentes scooped the British-born wunderkind up when he was still studying at Columbia University. Yi Hou had his first solo show with Fuentes in 2021 — the same year he graduated — shortly after debuting in group shows with Rachel Uffner in New York and Michael Kohn in LA. He won the UOVO Prize for emerging Brooklyn talents in 2022, and became one of the youngest artists to stage an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2023.

After stepping back from the initial buzz that swarmed his symbol-laden, colorful portraits (mostly immortalizing his cosmopolitan, creative friends), yi Hou returns to the limelight — this time, wiser and freer, yet more refined in his approach. His latest show, The beat of life, just opened at James Fuentes, and remains up through November 17. The exhibition follows yi Hou’s concept-driven museum show with ten slightly pared back, far more naturalistic paintings.

By Vittoria Benzine
Cover, Self-portrait (25), aka: The beat of life, 2024.
Photos by Shark Senesac, courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes New York & Los Angeles

“My first show with James, I’d just graduated college and I was really interested in academia and theory,” yi Hou told me over Zoom. He was preparing to unveil The beat of life, and I was at my boyfriend’s mother’s home in Yuma, on a month-long road trip interviewing strangers before the election. It’s been a whirlwind much like yi Hou’s experience of 2021 and 2022, cranking out art.

“[Academia and theory] heavily informed my practice,” yi Hou told me. “They still do now. But, this was prior to having lived life as an independent adult. As the years passed since graduation, a lot of the theory that I was reading started to be less applicable and less relevant.” Days later, my colleague Dorian Batycka posted an IG story of a classical sculpture from Art Basel Paris with a similar idea: “The fact that no one can (or wants to) make this anymore points to a wider problem: that art has become so obsessed with concept/theory (and money) over basic form.”

Thus, yi Hou is now drawing from daily existence — from “nightlife and putting myself out there,” he said. “Having sex — at least for gay men or queer men, that is a great way to make friends.” The title of his new show once again draws from a poem he wrote. It evokes police violence and music alike by referencing the thrum of a heart in a chest.

I can actually refuse any kind of closed meaning or thesis in whatever I make.

Birds of a Feather aka: Chinatown Gangsters, 2024.

The show itself simulates that sensation. For the first time, yi Hou presents several scales across The beat of life, which oscillates like a pulse between small, close-cropped busts of compatriots like yi Hou’s boyfriend, and larger arrangements like Birds of a Feather aka: Chinatown Gangsters (2024), which depicts yi Hou alongside artists Amanda Ba and Sasha Gordon. (Perhaps he’s angling for a Deitch show, too.) Across sizes, yi Hou amalgamates oils with gouache, graphite, and more. Yet, these works bear new marks of maturity, like the honesty of discerning one’s strengths and the power of saying less, a confident refusal to explain further.

Orange and magenta still flash throughout yi Hou’s linework, but rather than sculpting figures from many maximalist flat blocks of color, yi Hou has spent time tenderly rendering flesh and fabric true to life. Supple cheeks exposed via rich assless chaps greet guests entering The beat of life from Coolieisms, aka: Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man) (2023-24) — a painting named after Bruce Springsteen’s famous hit. Obama used the song to counter birther conspiracies, while Trump plays the pithy American critique patriotically at his rallies.

Coolieisms, aka: Born in the USA (Go and Kill the Yellow Man), 2023-2024.

This initial artwork hails from yi Hou’s ongoing Coolieisms series, which reclaims a 19th-century slur for exploited Chinese rail laborers by depicting Asian figures in the trappings of Americana.

“Was there a leather daddy back in the 1800s working in the mines?” yi Hou mused. “Probably not.” In Coolieisms, though, he uses his own visage and imagined characters to forge fictions that highlight stereotypes about Asianness, masculinity, heteronormative culture, and more.

Yi Hou has previously spoken about the paradox of representation, that newfound art world fixation. Representation isn’t necessarily action, but it’s necessary for an equitable society. “It can be a burden to think about these things, but it's also quite generative,” yi Hou added. Symbols carry historical meanings, while also offering canvases for each viewer’s projections. They’re ephemeral, but spark material impacts. There’s a chilling reality, after all, to rooms full of people singing “Go and kill the yellow man,” regardless of which politician might be playing it.

The Coolieisms series was once the one place yi Hou exercised license. “I was interested in the ethics of portraiture and trying to not commit any symbolic violence to another person through a painting,” he recalled. “As I got older, I was like, ‘wait, none of my sitters give a shit about that.’”

Symbols offered a sort of camouflage that enhanced while encrypting meaning. They’re active here, too. Yi Hou’s use of the color wheel proves somewhat new, but he’s harnessed sheriff’s stars and yin-yang signs before. “I've been interested in opacity and obscurity, generating mystery or opacity through these symbols,” he said of his compositions. “Because I've talked so much about them, they're a bit transparent now.” In another interview, yi Hou noted that sometimes indirect communications convey more. Thus, he’s set such icons ablaze in works like Self-portrait (25), aka: The beat of life (2024), “to further obfuscate the meaning behind them.”

Sailor Moon Rising aka: Pacific Passenger, 2023.

Even the show’s environmental elements carry palimpsest connotations. Cranes soar throughout that same self-portrait — in China, they symbolize longevity and luck, but these birds feature prominently, too, in the murals across Alamosa, CO, where the birds pause for a month or so each fall during their annual migration. Maybe the Navy man seated beside the sunflowers in Sailor Moon Rising aka: Pacific Passenger (2023) just likes those flowers, or perhaps he’s optimistic, as they’d allude. Or, maybe he’s from Kansas, where they adorn state highway signs.

Yi Hou’s affinity for the Beat poets first attracted him to America. He has yet to travel the country himself, though. Maybe he’s better off. We’ve met many people out here who espouse their open-mindedness without demonstrating it. One man in Iowa told me about his gay friends, but called protestors “thugs.” Americans appear inept at estimating themselves, but art actually does expand horizons. Another man in Idaho said that while discussing “On The Road” with a friend, he was shocked to learn there’s gay sex involved. “I’ll be damned,” he said upon a return read.

<em>Castro Comrade, aka: fourbird</em>, 2024. — *Castro Comrade, aka: fourbird*, 2024.

<em>The perfect initiate, aka: At the afters</em>, 2024 — *The perfect initiate, aka: At the afters*, 2024

<em>Habibi, aka: If you surrendered to air, you could ride it</em>, 2024. — *Habibi, aka: If you surrendered to air, you could ride it*, 2024.

Exposure is the answer to the biases still dogging America. Maybe representation isn’t the final solution, but it’s a good start — one that yi Hou is evidently mastering. “I can actually refuse any kind of closed meaning or thesis in whatever I make,” he said. “That's what I was doing with this body of work — the work inherently has a kind of politics and thinking behind it, but I feel it was less didactic and a lot more free.” Seeing alone has its power. The beat of life is an exercise in it.

The beat of life is on view at James Fuentes until November 16, 2024.

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