How were you introduced to the mediums that you work with?
I’ve been drawing my entire life and began making paintings as a teenager. Airbrush came a little later but felt like a natural extension of the spray can which I had some familiarity with. I started making sculpture in art school out of a continual urge to bring my painting language out of a projected imaginary and into physical form. This took a variety of paths including found object assemblages, paper mache and ceramics, and often combinations of the three.
What kind of imagery are you drawn to?
I’m drawn to certain objects and symbols that I feel have some kind of significance or potency to a larger schematic worldview I’m trying to assemble. Right now I’m super fascinated by architecture and the way urban space is partitioned and assembled, gas stations, oil companies, feudal city states, ancient places of worship, minor deities from various mythological traditions, plastic (melted and unmelted), the gig economy, unsanctioned structures, Ikea manuals, semi-legal supplements, cats, and lemurs.
Any core influences to your work?
As a kid I read pretty voraciously and loved the drawings of Quentin Blake (the Roald Dahl books), Bill Peet, Maurice Sendak, and comic book artists like Antonio Prohias (Spy vs Spy) among others. A little later on skateboarding and graffiti in the Bay Area and the visual cultures that come along with that were a huge influence.
The work of Philip Guston, Bruno Gironcoli, Jon Rafman, Heironymous Bosch, Huma Baba, Anna Uddenberger, David Altmedj, Bob Thompson, Viola Frey, James Duesing, Pierre Huyghe, Ashley Bickerton and so many others have all been super influential on my practice at one point or another. Two of my friends from art school, Connor O’neill and Tajo Mcburnie are some of my favorite painters and a huge influence on my work.
Is there a moment you look back on as being formative to your identity as an artist?
When I was 8 years old I was attacked by a Lemur. I haven’t looked back since.
When needed, where do you look for inspiration?
I take a lot of photos of things out in the world and get a lot of ideas for parts of paintings from those. It’s usually pretty abstract and my photography style is very detail oriented; if I go on a trip and someone asks to see a photo of the places I went, I’ll usually only have zoomed in photos of wall textures, animals or security cameras.
What is your approach to developing texture in your work? It is apparent in your sculptures, but it is present in your paintings, as well.
Texture building is a really intuitive process for me. I think a lot about the tactility of things, part of which maybe comes from skateboarding and the relationship to different surfaces wheels open up. I try not to use reference photos a lot of the time and just picture my interpretation of a thing in my mind’s eye. In paintings especially I think I render things very ‘literally’ in a sculptural way. If I’m painting a field of grass I will just paint every blade of grass, or for sand I will make a million dots and mix real sand into the paint.
Elements of the natural world are often depicted in your work, and at times, not too far from there are depictions of human technology encroaching closer. Is there a conversation you hope this fosters for the viewer?
Pretty essential to the core of my work is this feeling of tension between industrial -technological production and its relationship to the natural world, which by no means is an original thought– I think it’s something most artists and humans (and animals) struggle with, and have struggled with. Personally, ever since I can remember I’ve tripped out on the sheer scale of material in urban areas, the amount of metal, rock and biomass upheaved from the earth and sourced from so many different places, concentrated into these increasingly elaborate technical structures and systems. So much of recent human history (especially western) is based on this vying for control of resources in what feels like this endless process of death drive non-reciprocal extraction. Obviously we are doing things deeply wrong and out of sync with the planet, and I think that underlying feeling is pervasive throughout pretty much all of contemporary life.
I don’t know that I am so much trying to foster that conversation because I think the topic is so vast and is being had in places more suited to it than in art. I think what I aim to do in my work is express my own personal interpretation of that underlying feeling of out-of-syncness and tension, which (hopefully) can be related to by the viewer. I wouldn’t say I’m a full on anarcho-primitivist but I definitely can see the appeal at times (:<
Can you talk about your mixed media sculpture, Cloud – Industrial Juice – Vaper? What was the inspiration behind the work and what was the process for realizing it?
The initial inspiration for the sculpture was pretty straightforward, I wanted to recreate the repetitive action of someone hitting a vape over and over. There’s a ton of art about cigarettes either as this romanticized object of contemplation and angst, or as this abject representation of degeneracy and decay. What I love about the vape is it does away with all of that. It’s a machine of pure unmediated efficiency, one-shotting nicotine straight to your dome in a variety of delicious and hyperreal flavor profiles, each one ending its life as an eternal piece of landfill plastic. This denaturalized and repetitive addiction to a machine feels broadly applicable to a lot of different aspects of life today, most obviously to the phone and social media.
Vaping transcends cultural boundaries, but for the sculpture I wanted the vaper in question to be a work-out-supplement-body optimization kind of guy, as well as a trucker. Below the figure sits a display of scammy supplements, vitamins and energy pills that I’ve collected from gas stations over the years, and on his wrist is a fit-bit with a maxxed out heart rate. Above the figure this spiked tire endlessly rotates, with the Shell Oil logo and a crushed fairy attached to it. The vaper/trucker is placed in a subservient relationship to the machine and capital, and I think of this like a long haul trucker meeting their quotas; a human being pushing their body to the limit in order to facilitate the exchange of goods in machinic global supply chains. The piece was an attempt to bring together a lot of threads I’ve been interested in recently; short-term gamified addiction cycles, body optimization culture, the oil and gas industry, and the algorithmic pressures of human labor under the threat of coming automatization. Also, I just really wanted to make a sculpture of someone vaping because I thought it would be funny.
Physically realizing the sculpture was an interesting challenge, it was my first time working with animatronics, and considerations like weight, balance and structural integrity became way more important. The sculpture had to reliably perform and function for five hours during the opening of the show, and it forced my usual process of making to be much more utilitarian. Luckily, my friend Lewis is a mechanical engineer and was able to give advice with the structural and coding elements of the piece, as well as Joey and Joel from This Is a House Gallery where the piece was shown, who were super helpful in the three days of troubleshooting and installation.
What’s your current workspace like? Do you have any rituals when you settle in there?
I’m currently working out of a small studio in what used to be an old coffee factory in Oakland. It’s right by the shore of the Bay and you can hear freight trains going by, coming in and out of the Port. The building itself is well worn, cozy, and quiet. It’s been artist studios for a long time and I really like the space, although I am outgrowing it– slowly cocooning myself in with artwork and running out of storage. I’m not super ritualistic but I do always need a hot drink that inevitably goes cold while working.
How do you mitigate burnout or exhaustion?
Oof I don’t really. I’m pretty obsessive and will push myself to limits in the studio, spending too much time under fluorescent lights without enough sun. The things that bring me out of that and refresh me are pretty standard: my friends, taking walks and travelling, skateboarding and playing music are also good change-of-pace creative outlets for me, but honestly I’m still trying to figure out how to balance it all.
What is your experience as an artist living and working in the Bay Area?
The Bay Area has an insanely rich history and I feel very lucky to have grown up here and been steeped in it. Right now there’s a really big community of young artists and musicians, and an ethos among people that is definitely unique to the Bay. Since Covid it feels like a lot of the different creative scenes have melted together into one big pot which has been really cool to see. That being said and with all love for the Bay, I think it’s hard to be an artist here– there’s way fewer galleries and opportunities than in NYC or LA, and it can feel like an echo chamber that’s hard to break out of. A ton of people have spent time here, but they always seem to have to go somewhere else to ‘make it’.
The other big factor in the Bay Area is this tension between what was once this counter-cultural bohemian ideal and the tech companies and culture that have superseded it. There’s a lot of disparity here and it can feel like a microcosm for a lot of issues in the world at large, which I think informs my practice.
What do you collect?
I collect supplements from gas stations, animal trinkets, cool rocks, and hoard all kinds of pieces of industrial plastic and metal I believe will come in handy for a sculpture someday.
Interviewed by Luca Lotruglio.