Israel Lund is an MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of Arts. He has shown at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon, Galerie de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy in Nancy, France, 12Mail Gallery in Paris, France and Gallery Steinsland Berliner in Stockholm Sweden. His books, Some But Not All of My Clothes and Thrasher Fanzine (co-edited with Sam Korman) were published by Publication Studio and his work has appeared in Clark Magazine, Weekday and the forthcoming edition of Bronze Age.
What materials do you use in your work and what is your process like? Recently I’ve been making paintings using a truncated silk screen process on raw canvas. Instead of using a source image through which you would pull the ink through, as is in traditional screen printing, I burn an open rectangle into a screen and work within that. The final image is a result of manipulating the screen, the squeegee, the amount of ink I use, and the physical makeup of the canvas. Some of them end up looking like blown-up photocopies. For this interview I made a bunch of paintings where I literally photocopied some older paintings and then used a de facto CMYK screen print process to make these quasi copy paintings. Then I scanned them on the computer to get the image you see. There’s an R. H. Quaytman interview where she says she’d like to have “painting” in her materials list. I like that.
What kinds of things are influencing your work right now? E-40, the Internet, jokes, grad school, New York City, the Internet…
If you had to explain your work to a stranger, what would you say? It really depends on if I’ve been drinking or not.
What artists are you interested in right now? Virginia Overton, Cam’ron, Thomas Pynchon, Alex Felton.
What are your plans for the next year? Hopefully finish grad school, travel to places I’ve never been to, and swim in the Atlantic Ocean. I haven’t done that yet since moving back to the east coast.
What were you like in high school? All I cared about was skateboarding. I had an obsession with trying to skate at every skatepark in New England, so suffice to say I had a one-track mind. I grew up in Vermont.
What do you do when you’re not working on art? Since I’m in an MFA program, and work for an artist in the city, if I’m not making art, thinking about it, reading about it, looking at it, touching it, getting interviewed about it, or making jokes about it, I’m most likely trying to sleep. Or drinking coffee.
If you hadn’t become and artist, what do you think you’d be doing? Since I was obsessed with skateboarding and becoming a professional skateboarder didn’t pan out, the only other thing I remember saying I wanted to be was an R&B singer, so most likely that.
What are you really excited about right now? Living on the east coast again.
What was the last exhibition you saw that stuck out to you? This may be an obvious answer considering my work but Print/Out at MoMA was really exciting to me. Martin Kippenbergers piece “Content On Tour” was awesome, and I really liked Kelley Walkers piece “Andy Warhol Doesn’t Play Second Base For The Chicago Cubs.” Dan Walsh, Trisha Donnelly, and Franz West also had really good pieces in that show. Downstairs at MoMA in the contemporary section Dieter Roth’s piece “Solo Scenes” was epic! Darren Bader: Images at PS1 is definitely worth seeing, and Frances Stark’s video “My Best Thing,” also at PS1, was great! I swear this isn’t a MoMA plug.
