Zuriel Waters’s self portraits are earnest investigations in painting disguised in flamboyant sexual figures. His paintings border on the grotesque and yet they attract the viewer to look beyond the man boobs and the penetrating hand gestures, to the marks and the history behind each brushstroke.

We first met Zuriel Waters at RISD where he got his MFA in Painting and we were interested to see where his paintings would take him. Waters invited us to his live/work studio where we got a chance to view his new body of work for his show ‘Bad Boys’.

In the gallery almost life size paintings are hung in typical gallery fashion on white (#ffffff) walls and with enough space to give each painting room to breathe. The various personalities of each ‘Zuriel Waters’ portrait create a dialogue with one another. The most interesting arrangement is of two paintings that are hung together and touching corners which give the impression of being just a smidgen too close to each other’s personal space.

‘Bad Boys’ is currently on view until February 16th at Group Club Association (GCA)

F:How do you start approaching your paintings? Do you start with the figure or the space?

ZW: I usually start with drawings, very fast line drawings and more recently colored pencil drawings. Sometimes these can actually function as studies for paintings but usually it is just a way to get myself into the mindset for working. In terms of space, I guess the figure creates the space you know, and sometimes it comes out of it. It’s hard to say.

F: Does the (self-portrait) subject matter propel the painting or is it more of a reaction through the movements of painting?

ZW: The subject matter is kind of all important at first and sometimes, I’ll have a very clear idea of what I think the painting should be about. Sometimes this works! I love it when it works, because usually it does not work. Most often the initial idea gets painted over but maybe some small part of it will inform the next layer, like a general compositional idea or something. It’s funny, the ideas that will work in a painting, sometimes they are so dumb and simple, and sometimes just awkward overwrought pun-like things.

I think jokes and paintings are really similar. There’s this weird pdf I found online called “Greg Dean’s Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy” that basically outlines jokes in this insanely formal way that ends up looks like lines of code or a math problem. It doesn’t exactly produce funny things, but if you follow the rules, you definitely end up with something that feels like a joke. Sometimes that’s the best kind of joke though. Rodney Dangerfield seems to do that all the time in his stand-up. There will be this litany of one-liners that are so off the mark but you end up laughing because of the constructed-ness of the situation, where you begin to see yourself almost as the laugh track and less of as a discerning audience member that gets to vote with their laughter. Tig Notaro too; her jokes are kind of the opposite in a formal sense because they are so long winded that finding the conventional joke structure within her stories is somehow really part of the humor about the situation. It seems like these kind of comedians are using the ‘joke text book’ in a more abstract way, something to work against. So yeah, I think you can look at art-making like this. There is a sense of standard expectations that we have when we go into a show and that creates opportunities for artists to hit them or play with them or intentionally completely avoid them. I guess this is all a way of saying that the subject matter is completely embedded in the formal structure of the painting. It’s like if paintings are people, then you wouldn’t say (anymore) that you know, you have your brain and then your have your body and there’s this cartesian split between them, because now I think we know how constructed and physically molded our identities are. I mean unless you are a religious person. I guess it’s easy to take atheism for granted in the art world though.

F: I have to know. Are your self portraits painted from life or from a reference?

ZW: Well, not really either. At one point I did take some photos of me to use as a reference, and it was a really cool body connection to have with the kind of posing and attitude that I was going for. Maybe it’s something I should do more, but usually, if it is a reference then they all come from those little drawings I make.

I’ve been thinking about getting a big mirror though…

Courtesy of the artist

F: Your paintings are overtly sexual in nature and there’s a conflicting ambiguousness in the subject matter’s gender. Can you talk about the feminine and masculine qualities found in these figures?

ZW: If you google search for my name ‘Zuriel Waters’ there is this cheesecake style photo I took of myself as an art piece during grad school that comes up really high on the list. I’m just wearing frumpy socks and rolled up underwear and Im trying my best to have this lolita like victim/aggressor attitude. I don’t know why, sometimes you want to feel edgy and sexy, you know. So, I started adding boobs to my body. There’s this painting I did for Steve Mykytien’s Orgy Park show that is me in this sort of painful orgasmic rapture clutching my tits and having an aching hard-on that was really inspired by that photo. The boobs afterwards ended up being this almost like cartoon character uniform symbology. In other words they started as a way to amp up my ability to sexualize/objectify my body and are now these almost like dumb appendages. I also have boobs in real life too, I mean not me especially, but men have boobs too obviously and sometimes they are kind of floppy and misbehaving and I always thought it was annoying that we have no way of like claiming that body part in a non like body armor kind of way.

F: I feel that these paintings verge on the idea of painting as a form of masturbation especially since these are self-portraits. It’s as much about you masturbating by making the work as it is masturbating for the viewer visually. Either way, we’re all getting off…

ZW: Ew gross… I mean, totally

F: The colors are really great in these paintings. The thick paint and bright colors really pop off the gray surface which in turn, invites the viewer to peer closer at each individual mark. Can you talk a bit about your process and decision making within this?

ZW: Um… color is so hard. It’s such a weird thing to think about. It’s really important to me, because it is so associative and really connected to the way we get around in the world. I noticed in this show that I use a lot of green, but it’s not something I really ever thought about before. Paint is hard too, I mean just getting a color from the palette to the surface and have it be anything like you want is a challenge, and it’s so physical the way that certain pigments are really aggressive and others are so passive. I guess in terms of color and paint handling I just do the best I can, because I am so mystified by it. Growing up with Photoshop I think messes you up a bit when you think about painting and especially color, because it’s really the easiest thing to control on the computer and the opposite in paint. I feel like really primitive when it comes to it, like I have funny mythological explanations for it like as if it’s based on the weather or the stars or something.

F: How do you see these paintings evolving? What future projects do you have in store?

ZW: I mentioned the big mirror before, that could be one avenue. I know I want to get more deep into the space in the paintings, the most recent painting I made has the figure sort of painting on glass in the foreground with a super simple approximation of my studio in the background and it sort of opened up a different way of thinking about it all formally. So there’s that, but you know I wouldn’t really expect that anything like that will actually happen, it’s just a way to get started.

You can see more of Zuriel Waters’s works at www.zurielwaters.com

We met with Michael Assiff to talk about Bali Ha’i, his current solo show now up at the Culture Room. Green monochrome paintings fill the room alongside small prop items which seem casually placed within the space. Four large paintings face each other while a series of extinct animal pattern paintings are hung stacked vertically on the third wall. Found in the corners of the room are five mangos with various labels marked Bali Ha’i, a Monster Energy drink can, a pair of green plastic shoes, and a New Yorker type cartoon that hint at the dialogue between the paintings and the objects.

The slash marks found predominantly in his pieces are directly inspired by the logo of a Monster Energy Drink he found in the jungle of Costa Rica. Within the gallery space, a physical Monster drink can is “littered” in the corner beside the heat furnace, working as a literal reminder of his inspiration. Assiff’s larger pieces are influenced by the jungles of Costa Rica and the perfectly manicured lawn of Bali Ha’i, a Vegas golf course and resort of which the show is titled after. His work plays with the contrasts between the natural plant imagery found in his paintings and the green plastic synthetic coating he uses to cover the surface.

Bali Ha’i is on view until November 10th at the Culture Room which is located at 163 Starr Street #4L in Bushwick, NY. Open only by appointment.

F: At first glance the paintings appear as though they are simply poured on and the image is being organically created. Only upon closer inspection, you realize that the organic pouring is a ruse. The relief is carefully and meticulously rendered by hand using the plastic material. Can you talk about your process and the organic read of the image versus its calculated creation? Also, the decision to depict the natural world in a green plastic manufactured looking surface is an interesting choice. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MA: I will admit I have, which I think is pretty common, both a wonderment and a deep repulsion to plastic. In practice I try my best to avoid touching it, eating out of it, strapping it to my body. But I felt in order to talk about environmentalism in painting, I had to create a type of thing that could contend with the type of objects that are being produced by the systems that are so engaged with environmental exploitation – petroleum and plastics. So the short of it is that I seek to make a mass-produced continuous plastic surface that not only depicts but embodies the layered reality of manufacturing, land-use and nature.

But yeah, I am still a “painter” and I will continue to have these humble means of production that I use to interrogate this large scale subject matter. I think it is important that I am harnessing this “made in china” language while standing in my studio in Brooklyn. I guess I’m interested in what happens when you find out this mass produced looking object is one of a kind. Like the way paintings are historically supposed to be one of a kind. What if we all drove one of a kind cars? Texted with bespoke cell phones. But I should say friends should be relieved to know that the materials I landed on are non-toxic and I’m hopefully not gonna die like those 70s West Coast resin painters.

F: Earlier, you mentioned that you were influenced by your recent trip to Costa Rica, can you talk a little bit about that and how you landed on the Monster logo imagery in your work?

MA: I stayed in Costa Rica with some friends that run a yoga / surf retreat called the Yoga Farm. It is stuck right where rainforest meets the sea in a microscopic town that is close to the Panama border. I had brought watercolors and pencils and my smart phone which has a camera in it. But I felt these were extremely reductive ways for me to engage with the rainforest. I instead spent days walking the beach collecting sea plastic.

What fascinated me was that Monster Energy Drink, or the logo rather, is really popular in among the Ticos – that the local people are making their own Monster logos and sewing them to their clothes, painting it onto their ATVs.

There is something loaded about the violence of the three slashes, about the green glow. Its like on one hand its some dark forest beast spirit, yet on the other hand its this western agro kind of thing. When I was there I had a lot of conversations about deforestation. I mean its naked to see, these pastures, these clear cut cow pastures with these sick skinny cows. Apparently no one has a clear idea about why the cattle are not thriving down there. But the monster slashes became this metaphor for slash and burn, clear cutting.

F: Your work is very monochromatic and neutral except for this particular shade of green. It’s very prominent in your work. How did you land on this color?

MA: I looked for a ubiquitous shade of green that would not draw attention to any particular variation of its warmness or coolness. I wanted a green that is closer to a noun than an adjective. I guess I write about the green being an average of garden hose, john deere tractor and MTA green. Also USDA certified organic green. These things were all in my mind when I was mixing this green, but in the end I sort of just cleared my head and did kundelini yoga and drank green tea and then it came to me.

Also just to say out loud “I make green plastic paintings” creates a sort of linguistic content that speaks to the content of my work – you know, its about the way the word “green” is used these days.

F: The negative space left through the absences of the green paint is reminiscent of a topographical map of lakes. What role does the idea of maps play with your paintings?

MA: So I started with the big Henri Rousseau paintings. I was copying Rousseau’s landscapes pretty faithfully except for the animals and people. Where these creatures appeared I would leave blank allowing the canvas underneath to show. The paintings began to appear as land masses with these subtractions being bodies of water. In the new paintings these absences are planned using golf course maps to determine the negative space. The blank spaces being the fairways. To me, this kind of land use is highly aestheticized deforestation. I am embarrassed how intrigued I’ve become with golf course design. Its really beautiful the kind of shapes that are used.

F: The way the extinction pattern paintings are stretched, enveloping the surface and bunching up in the corners, draws attention to the plasticized material and I see them more so as objects than paintings. The addition of the repetitive animal patterns and prominent slash symbol start to draw ideas of textiles, logos and branding. Can you describe your feelings of these paintings as objects?

MA: The extinction pattern paintings definitely take heavy cues from designer handbags. I was looking at this green S/S 2013 Louis Vuitton handbag as inspiration. I went to Macys to hold a LV bag in person. I had never handled one before, and I was worried these paintings I was making weren’t luxurious enough. I was actually a little surprised on how the bags feel. They are much cheaper feeling then I thought they’d be. I also found out from the salesperson that the bag online that I’d been referencing was a knock-off and that LV didn’t actually produce bags in the brilliant green color.

The pattern paintings are actually very top heavy conceptually. Each painting’s pattern motif is from a species of animal that went extinct in the the year of the painting. The year of the painting is indicated by the number of monster slashes. The shade of color and the title beginning in A/W or S/S refers to the time of year the species was believed to have perished.

F: Most of the work in the show takes the pretty traditional form of a painting on canvas. The addition of the mangos with the ‘slash’ logo labels, the Monster can, the commissioned New Yorker cartoon, and the green plastic coated shoes work as physical objects hinting at your sources of inspiration. What was your approach to setting up the show and choosing these specific pieces and objects?

MA: I think that as a painter working with such a specific vocabulary that I have the responsibility to provide clues to the audience. Yet I am completely aware that there is no way at the audience arriving at the same meaning that I had in mind. Also, it is important for me to have “the work” live along side non-art objects as well as objects created by other artists. I’m just a bit wary of the solipsism of one isolated vision. I hope populating the gallery with other kinds of objects may force something I can’t completely control into the conversation.

But to be more specific about the mangoes, they have altered produce stickers that refer to this fictive island that the Bali Ha’i golf course painting also refers to. That is about the fiction we imagine about the country of origin when we buy produce.

I hung a New Yorker cartoon that I had my friend Clay Schiff draw with the Monster in jail counting the days by scratching into the jail cell wall. The idea was that it would, in very illustrative terms, describe my appropriation of the Monster slash as tally mark, counting down to extinction!

Courtesy of the artist

F: What are you currently working on? Are there any future projects in store?

MA: Yeah, I’m starting work on this show at Good Weather. I am thinking about portraiture, the psyche, stress balls, clocks, anxiety, etc. The show is opening on Valentine’s Day so it has to have some romance. Whether that’s the romance of anxiety or alienation or whatever. I’ve had really intense protocols on how to make art about landscape and animals with plastic. I want to find out what language I can use to represent people and time. I don’t know, it could all change but that’s where I’m at now.

I’m also working on a two person show with Sterling Wells. We have some shared interests in nature and landscape and plastic. The show revolves around this historical site in our shared home town of St. Petersburg. This site has all of these indigenous peoples’ mounds and is said to be the place Panfilo de Narvaez landed in the 1500s to colonize Florida.

Bali Ha’i is on view until November 10th at the Culture Room
You can see more of Michael Assiff’s work at www.michaelassiff.info.

Fittingly, we communicated with the the curators via email about the challenges of the show and constant reexamination of the relationships between the works.

‘Elastic de Facto’ is on view at Carter & Citizen until August 17th. However, the images can be viewed on Picture Menu’s website at any time.

F: How did the idea for the show come about?

PM: Elastic de facto developed from conversations between the three of us about how to approach the inherent problems associated with any attempt at articulation through the configuration or organization of artworks. These discussions began to broach themes of fluidity between documentation and art space, the cache and compilation of images and texts online, the question of whether the primary site of a show is physical or web-based, and the question of how time and a kind of “second guessing” or attention to second, third, fourth, thoughts might elucidate artworks.

F: The documentation of the the work seems to be as important as the changes within the work. It acts as another level of curation. Can more than one work be manufactured with the same object through placement/documentation?

PM: Presentation and documentation were always crucial to our previous Picture Menu projects and were heavily considered, but the shows up to this point were all either one-person or two-person shows that focused more on the individual artist’s objectives or possible connections between the two, and were mostly only open for one night. This project at Carter & Citizen was not bound by the same brevity and we saw it as an opportunity to continue to consider the relationship of presentation and documentation more carefully and closely, along with exploring some different questions.

PM: We also knew that not all three of us would be able to spend the entire month outside of New York, and the difference in location became a topic of conversation. Eventually, this led us to fully and openly negotiate how the documentation of the show could become an even more important and active element. The fact that the physical location was decidedly more concrete yet our relationship as a group to this place was more temporal became a defining element of the exhibition and our means to staging it.

PM: The show is a performative approach to curating, or a curatorial approach to performance. The act of documenting is part of the performance, in which the amount of mediation and assumptions behind presentation become blurred, along with the typical separation between images of the show and images in the show. Documentation of the work, at times, becomes the work itself.

F: Are you just as invested in how the space changes online as well as in the physical space?

PM: All three of us democratically set up the initial iteration of the show for the opening; but as you know, the plan from the outset was for Rachel to stay in Los Angeles throughout the duration of the show. Therefore, she is choreographing the show on-site and Michael and Keith are making observations, suggestions, and writing other, more poetic, responsive texts. Rachel is then posting excerpts of these texts online, often after editing and splicing them together in surprising ways that sometimes counter their original meaning. The correspondence is integral to the development and progress of the exhibition and the three of us are all simultaneously experiencing it as participants and observers, which is quite exciting to us.

F: Is viewing it online on par with viewing the work in the physical space?

PM: We are all three artists, acting as curators in this instance; the question of separating these two roles is central to the exhibition. Additionally, we each recognize a current divisiveness between certain camps’ adherence to the exhibition space or allegiance to digital representation. We find such hard lines drawn to be problematic distractions and instead seek to conflate and contradict the two in order to try to focus on the relationships between artist, artwork, and art viewer.

PM: Having said that, when selecting the works we did, we wanted to have a diverse grouping of artists and artworks to cull from and recycle in order to mold the show, while complicating the framework and challenging ourselves and our viewers. Since we purposely set out to not have a direct, didactic theme, but rather one that was more malleable (hence the title), this allowed us (as well as the artists) to have some freedom and fun. What is originally embedded in any given work will likely always remain to some degree, but the way in which it was perceived on opening night hopefully can and will be open to new interpretations on day 4, 7, 12, or 18.

F: There’s a great deal of humor in each of the works from Brad Troemel’s vacuum sealed bitcon with the book The Violence of Financial Capitalism to Benjamin Bellas’ Filming a TV being shown on a TV. Can you talk a little about the connection with each of the works in relationship with one another?

PM: For example, in Brad Troemel’s TSA No Fly List series, by vacuum sealing recent leftist writings published by Semiotext(e) together with physical bitcoins, he is dealing with communication (or the lack thereof), the subversion of subversive acts, and the balancing of obscure rhetoric with an even more obscure subculture. This piece is related to Benjamin Bellas’ video where he knowingly tapes over his only copy of his wedding tape with the episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Raymond tapes over his only copy of his wedding tape with a New York Jets football game. Benjamin then staged a “living room” set-up and filmed the entirety of the new mash-up work being viewed on a mini TV/VCR combo in HD and we displayed this hybrid video on a flat screen. The deliberate nature of both of these acts combined with the self-awareness to balance autonomy and complicity is not only humorous and perplexing, but very slippery. We felt this initial sort of relationship lucidly illustrated what we are after with this project.

PM: There is also an acute sympathy between Vlad Smolkin’s work and Victoria Fu’s. Vlad’s intensely elaborate investigation of an abandoned private pool near his family’s home is an unexpectedly hopeful work. There is a sublime quality and absurdist humor to the unfurling details within his binder of images he took of the pool’s grounds; these are complemented by other mysteriously sourced images, as well as each of the repurposed physical objects he procured from his trips. The slow revelations that come from spending time with his works parallel those that come from watching Victoria’s video of a dancer attempting to create a visual palindrome through planned choreography and reverse footage. This trancelike work is emblematic of the show’s premise; it is symbolic in that the three of us are planning, choreographing,responding, and retracing our steps throughout this show.

All photos courtesy of Picture Menu.

F: I think a key line in one of your emails is “Viewers and Rachel are subjects, players.” How do you define each of your roles in this project?

PM: What we are pointing at in this show is an exposed process wherein curation is made vulnerable to time, change, and distance. Meanings accrue between objects and images as they are displaced. The idea of curatorial “vision” becomes deflated as new iterations pile up, and the notion of physically locating the show becomes irrelevant as our prose breaks apart in both misunderstanding and deliberate rearrangement.

Elastic de facto is up until August 17 at Carter & Citizen, 2648 La Cienega Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90034. You can see more of Picture Menu’s process at www.picturemenu.org.

On the 4th of July, we headed to FJORD Gallery in Philadelphia, PA for an early look at their latest show, ‘Body Without Organs.’ ‘Body Without Organs’ is an installation showcasing the material-based paintings of Sean Robert Fitzgerald alongside the playful unconventional sculptural work of Alex Da Corte. Together, the work is playful but the colors and materials combined create an eerie dream-like environment. We were able to talk with Sean and get his insight on working collaboratively on the show while simultaneously running a gallery space and curating shows. After our interview, we wondered around upstairs to the studio spaces where Sean’s own studio is located.

Fjord Gallery is the creation of Philadelphia-based artists, Lindsay Chandler, Liam Holding, AJ Rombach and Sean Robert Fitzgerald along with Natessa Amin, Cameron Masters, and Justine Jividen. The 3-story building holds a gallery on the ground floor with studio spaces on the 2nd and 3rd floors. ‘Bodies Without Organs’ is FJORD’s 13th show in the gallery’s 1.5 year history and is on view from July 5-28th.

Courtesy of FJORD Gallery

SF: The show is a collaborative work in progress between Alex and I, who met about a year ago and really hit it off in an artistic way. We quickly found that there were a lot of weird parallels between our work that we never even expected because we both work in very different ways and with very different subject matters. We collaborated earlier this year on a project for Title Magazine called ‘A Love Sonnet for Jack Smith’, which was a lot of fun. We made these short little animated GIF’s that were structured as a sonnet and inspired by imagery culled from some of Jack Smith’s films. We’ve had the idea brewing for this show for a while now, where Alex would basically make these props for my paintings. And by doing so, the paintings themselves are inevitably changed through the very act of collaborating. I came over to his studio and brought 15 or so paintings and told him he could choose whichever ones he wanted. We’ve been throwing these ideas back and forth for a couple of months and here it is!

F: How did you and Alex work together to create the final pieces? Did you re-work the paintings after or did you give Alex complete freedom to do what he wanted with your paintings?

SF: Some of them were more like – “You can do whatever you want,” whereas some of them were much more collaborative. Or sometimes I’d provide him with a loose sort of guideline for how I wanted the piece to be displayed. For example with this piece, the only real requirement I had was that both sides of the paintings had to be visible because a lot of the times, I re-work paintings by flipping the canvas around and re-stretching it. This one, I really liked from both sides. But, for example, the trapdoor piece In the other room we built together and it came about in this really almost unspoken organic way when Alex and I were hanging out in his studio one day. The show is very much about theatricality and parlor tricks so we thought how perfect to stick this little painting in this trap door hovering over this piece of black velvet.

Courtesy of FJORD Gallery

F: It has that cartoon humor, but in this super physical, textural and constructed way. It has this weird mix.

SF: That’s something that I found really interesting when working with sculpture and collaboratively with Alex. As soon as you turn something with this cartoony aspect into something physical it becomes really uncanny and strange. Have you ever seen when they turn things we know as cartoons into real life? It becomes really disturbing. Everything about it feels just wrong and I love it.

F: How do you feel about your canvases and these paintings that are very formal? You can look at them as image driven pieces but the way you are presenting them completely negates that.

SF: I actually really like that. Any opportunity in which an artist gets to see their work in a new context is automatically helpful. Even if you don’t like how you’re seeing it, it helps you think about it in a different way. I like how my paintings become objects in a very different way than if they were stuck on the wall. They have a completely different physicality in the space as part of a sculpture.

F: Was there one particular piece that you see totally different now?

SF: Yeah, this one over here is really cool. So going back to the idea of trickery or theatricality and parlor tricks, this one, I now see completely differently. First of all, the yellow wall completely sucks out this actually bright cadmium yellow and makes [the painting] into this poopy green. So that totally changed and the fact that this painting was re-streched over another support. The whole thing is really disturbing in that magic-trick or cartoon way because it looks like it’s floating when actually, if you look closely, the entire piece is supported against the the wall by this crystal heart at the top. It’s nice to give the viewer these extra little nuggets of detail that they can notice should they want to really engage with the piece in a more than superficial way.

F: The illusion is broken by having the heart there. It’s a smack in the viewers face which is great. How did you determine what the color of the wall should be? Did you create the pieces and then choose a color from
the objects?

SF: The wall colors came from a couple of different things. In certain aspects, the choices for the wall colors were formal, but they also help to relate the pieces back to each other and form this sort of narrative throughout the show. Also, this Grace Jones album cover was a big inspiration for a lot of it which really just clicked as soon as Alex showed it to me and then everything came full circle and made total sense.

Courtesy of FJORD Gallery

F: Yeah For sure! This is exactly like the promotional image with the figure in black tights.

SF: Absolutely, which goes back to the Grace Jones cover, which goes back to this figure sculpture, which goes back to the title, which goes back to the ‘body without organs’ idea and the act of collaboration. It’s all a big circle.

F: There’s also this domesticity about the objects as well. I feel that this is a strange out of place apartment that I’ve walked into. The space feels like an apartment. Was it ever one?

SF: Yeah I think it was before it became Fjord. There’s actually 9 studios upstairs but it probably was an apartment and probably will be again which is really weird to think about. There’s definitely this really uncomfortable stage set thing going on. We made the installation and set the lighting knowing it was going to be primarily viewed at nighttime, so the lighting is very specific. For example, The other room is terribly uncomfortable in the way its lit. There’s only 2 lights and they’re really dim so it feels like you’re on the set of a David Lynch film or you’re stuck in a bad made for TV movie. In this space with the plant, you get the impression you’re in an office waiting room and everyone else waiting is smoking these cheap cigarettes and you just want to get out but you can’t.

F: All the details have been stripped away where this is a stand-in for an entire space stripped down to its very basic parts. Also with the idea of a cartoon, the logic of when you make a caricature, you draw certain attributes to create an intimate recognizable thing and this has the same vocabulary.

SF: I agree, especially because everything is a prop for itself. The clock doesn’t work and the palm tree doesn’t grow. It’s a really good way of thinking about it.

F: When you look at the space that way, you seem to notice the construction of the building too.

SF: Its funny, all of those things disappear when the walls are painted white. As soon as you paint them a color you’re transported to that house that hasn’t been built yet and you start to notice that the ceilings aren’t properly finished and maybe all of these things are actually floating off the ground a few inches.

F: All the objects feel like they came out of this apartment too.

SF: Yeah, this apartment that doesn’t actually exist. Or this cartoon apartment turned into this real-life nightmare tragicomedy with a man that you can only see out of the corner of your eye. Dressed in black, moving things around.

F: Also you have the transparent brick pattern over brick.

SF: A fake of a fake. The show is very much about things you’re not actually supposed to see. As if we were watching a magician from behind.

‘Body Without Organs’ is up until July 28 at FJORD Gallery. You can see more of Sean Robert Fitzgerald’s work at www.seanrobertfitzgerald.com.

Christopher K. Ho is a New York based artist. We visited him while he was finishing installing his current show “Demoiselles d’Avignon” at Y Gallery. Utilizing 3D printed ceramics, antique glass and Color-aid paper, Chris creates art objects that vacillate between utilitarian coffee table-like sculpture and constructed painting. Following the path of his last show “Privileged White People” at Forever & Today he revisits the relationship between the primitive “other” and abstraction.

We were transported into a Miami penthouse-esque room complete with white carpeting upon walking into Y gallery on Orchard Street. Subsequently, our shoes would soil the carpet, a process that reminds the viewer of their own presence and turns the carpet into a literal “un-painted” ground.

F: Can you talk about what you want to achieve in terms of the feeling of the gallery space?

CH: With stairs going down slightly at the entrance, low ceilings, and track lighting, Y Gallery evokes a kind of Upper East Side 1950′s gallery—akin to an apartment and quite distinct from contemporary art spaces elsewhere on the Lower East Side or in Chelsea. So I chose light fixtures to go along with the gallery’s domestic feel. The carpet is also domestic—albeit 80′s LA or 90′s Miami rather than ‘50s New York.

F: How did you choose the wall color?

CH: The carpet came first. I balanced the need for a low pile (for stability) and the desire for the whitest carpet available. From the carpet, I chose the wall color. It’s not quite gallery white—it’s tinted green.

F: Could you talk a little bit about your print in relationship to the objects?

CH: The print is a montage of several of Picasso’s sketches for ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ I tried to give it a dream-like quality. It’s an evident link to the exhibition’s title.

F: It very much has this digital Photoshop feel but it also has the hand peeking through.

CH: The hand is from a drawing of Picasso’s that was blown up and proportioned in the aspect ratio of “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which is not quite square.

F: Going back to the objects…. I start thinking about Picasso’s sculptures.

CH: The piece over there titled “Pastiche” with white ceramic pyramid-shaped feet is the most Picasso-esque, I feel, partially because the cast pattern of the Marisco glass resembles the stippling of his late work. But as Alex Benenson points this out in his essay for this exhibition I wasn’t thinking about it and other works as analogues to, say, “Demoiselles” so much as to the African masks that purportedly inspired Picasso. These [referencing the pieces] would be like the masks at the Trocadero, which some future artist might encounter as the “other.”

F: It’s great to see how these are so layered and you can almost read them as paintings.

CH: And I would encourage that reading….paintings-slash-coffee tables!

F: Do you have a set imagined space in mind when you create them?

CH: They were made as individual pieces. I did not have Y Gallery, or any gallery, in mind. I suppose I knew they were half paintings, half coffee tables and that there was a possibility they would end up in domestic settings.

F: Would you be okay with them being utilitarian objects at some point?

CH: If these don’t sell, I’ll use them—I need coffee tables too!

F: The objects resting on top transform them into pedestals too. Having objects resting on top of certain ones draws attention to the lack of objects in others.

CH: The objects were chosen and placed to give material and textural contrast. I think that the fundamentals of art—material, form, color—are interesting again.

F: It is interesting talking about getting back to fundamentals because Color-aid is literally the first thing you do as a student: “Look what this red does next to this yellow…” Other than the Color-aid, what are some other materials you use in the coffee tables?

CH: In “The White One,” the bottom sheet of glass is Starphire, an ultra clear glass with an intense green edge. The top is flashed opal, which is a colorless soda-lime glass fused to a thin white layer that creates very little shadow. There’s weird stuff that happens in it too with the Color-aid. The deep brown Color-aid beneath is cut into wonky shapes.

F: It looks like you wet the paper in places to make it more transparent.

CH: I began with tiny sketches made on newsprint with a Sharpie—hence the looseness. Then I enlarged the sketches and reproduced them as watermarks on thick sheets of paper. Then I cut the watermarked paper into various shapes and made templates for the glass in response to those shapes. Finally, I added cut Color-aid.

F: Are the paper sheets adhered to the glass or are they sandwiched in between?

CH: They’re sandwiched in between and held in place with slivers of archival double-sided tape. The handmade paper is thick and rough, so it doesn’t stick particularly well. Also, everything has a slight angle to it. Nothing is at a perfect horizontal.

F: It gives it this trapese act if you will.

CH: They look unstable, right? But they’re all sturdy.

F: What kind of material is that?

CH: It’s antique glass edged with five types of gold leaf, in a gradient from rose to yellow. Because, really, one type of gold leaf is not enough for vivacity.

F: I saw at your last show “Privileged White People.” You used gold leaf in the pedestal piece “Trout College.” Gold leaf seems to play a role in your work.

CH: Who doesn’t love gold leaf? “Privileged White People” also included a piece with watermarked paper squeezed between sheets of glass. It was propped on four bottles of Issey Miyake’s L’eau d’Issey. This show evolved from that piece. I haven’t reconciled privileged white people and primitivism, but there’s something there…

Demoiselles d’Avignon is up until May 4 at Y Gallery, 165 Orchard Street. You can see more of Christopher Ho’s work at www.christopherho.com