Big-time Art

Richard Kurtz is a textural adventurer, exploring the surfaces of old bank bags, antique luggage, children’s books — all of it left in his wake stamped with his flat, painterly icons in reds, blacks, and whites: boxing colors, bold and physical. This feisty imagery stands in contrast to the artist’s soft-spoken, meditative personality, making it that much more intriguing.

Tell me about your art.

RICHARD KURTZ Well what you hear and see are prize fighters, boxers and women boxers, and for me the image of the boxer is someone who is very present in his body and grounded and what I do is I integrate text with the image, and the text is my daily mantra or something that I’m thinking about or I hear, and in the booth today there’s some images of Flash, and the Flash character is for me an alchemical, otherworldly character from some kind of multi-verse that’s able to see around corners and reconnect with other dimensions of reality.

Would you say he’s a persona? Is he a version of you?

Of course. It’s different from an all-knowing character. It’s someone whose intuition is heightened, it’s someone who’s able to see signs, so within the body, able to move, able to move down this street.

What is his super power? I don’t remember.

Flash to me is someone who is very fast. Being in New York city and learning to being able to move through the…

Bullshit?

Yes it’s the ability to physically move and also, like you said, move through the bullshit. It’s a time-suck, there are people who want to take things from you, but also there’s a fusion energy, where two people are greater than each other.

I love all these objects, do you just paint over the books that you find?

Yeah, for example I use old Golden Books, the ones we grew up with, I kind of reconfigure the Golden Books and create a non-linear story. Do you they always include flash? Are there any other characters? There’s “How to Survive if Your Parachute Fails to Open Meet an Unusual Woman,” so this is a woman character.

What’s your favorite texture?

Besides the human body, I like paper. And it depends on the paper, it kind of has a grain to it, there’s something feels holy, it’s a… I wouldn’t say ‘object’, but because the written word is able to go onto it it’s a grounds to expand. I’m a firm believer in the oral tradition of storytelling, and at the same time to be able to — that’s what I like about the small cards, I can take a card, it says, “Now we rise, we are everywhere,” and I feel that’s something for everyone living on the planet today, it’s coming together whether it’s sexuality or some kind of physicalness. This card is from 2014 at the fair, you can see it’s textural, it has fabric, they resonate, they become a talisman, some people have an altar, you can place it on your altar, it can be something that brings you back to a place of reconnection of who you may be or who you are. I like the portable quality to them, the cards, the suitcases. I came across these old bank bags, they’re canvas — there’s a texture, a weight to them, they used to hold money, there’s something physical.

So that’s the connection to the boxer is the physicality?

For me it’s all about being in my body.

If you could explore deep space or the deep sea, which would you choose?

Space. Space to me is the connotation of floating. It’s very expansive. The sea — Obviously there’s a depth to the sea but there’s a pressure. I feel like I’m being compressed. So when I think of compression I think of depression, suppression, oppression. Space to me feels like an expansive place to go.

Steve Mosley is a jocular man making merry rogue art: hand-carved wooden Christian religious figures inside bourbon bottles posed as 3-D satirical cartoons, a bit like The Far Side or something from The New Yorker, some with gleefully defamatory statements on wooden sign posts protruding from the corks. How could I resist speaking with this man?

Where are you from?

STEVE MOSLEY I’m originally from Louisville, Kentucky, but I’m in St. Louis now, Missouri.

How did you get into art?

I became a stay-at-home dad 20 years ago and I needed something to do, and I wanted something to do where the little kids wouldn’t have their hands all over it, touching it. So I started with ships in the bottle, and I started making those and got bored with them after a while, and I was talking to a guy and he said you should do these whimsy bottles, that was ten years ago, and after that I started making these.

They’re called whimsy bottles?

There’s three names for them: whimsy bottles, patience bottles and pullcart bottles, but I’ll take patience bottles.

So it has a long history?

First ones were probably during the 1700s, a whole lot during the 1800s and early 1900s, then it petered out after World War II — when bottles became commonplace that’s when it became big, about 1900 or 1880s, something like that. Then after World War II, barely anybody. I’m one of like seven people in the world who do this. It’s very rare now.

Do you think that plays into your art in any way?

It plays into my art in that I’m analytical. And I like to work with my hands. I was a good technician when I was in the lab, and I can do stuff with my hands and visually see it. And they’re bottles, so they’re reminiscent of chemicals. Well, actually the great thing is they’re bourbon bottles, and my wife LLC’d me, and now they’re a tax deduction (laughs). These are bourbon bottles.

Do you drink it all? What do you do with all the bourbon?

I drink it, sure. But I’ll tell you a story. God wants me to do this, because there’s another friend who puts decks of cards in bottles, and he needed some help with toppers, he lived in Chicago, he said, “Steve, sit down, the distributor for Jim Bean’s bottles just moved in next door to me” —so there’s like 13 million people in Illinois and the guy moves in next to him. I said I’ll buy as many as he wants, 10 bucks a piece, and I bought a hundred of them.

So you don’t drink all this bourbon.

Well I do drink a lot of it, and my wife helps me out. I have friends who help me out, too. Gotta support the arts.

One of the most popular pieces at the fair, Underground Subway Living, is an extensively populated piece stretching the length of an entire wall, the figures living their lives under our noses — one feels that at any moment they may come to life. The piece contains wonder, cheek, and social comment, and it’s a joy to look at — all the things art sets out to do. Jordan Maclachlan was a petite woman, and she wasn’t unlike her art: silly with a contemplative streak.

Tell me about your art.

JORDAN MACLACHLAN I make large pieces, well I make lots of tiny ones. This is one piece, it’s called Unexpected Subway Living, and it’s based on my idea of what would happen if all of us lost our housing due to a natural disaster, and then we go underground to live in the subway, and what would that be like? So there’s a farm area where they’re butchering animals and growing plants, there’s a surgery area, there’s women giving birth, there are acts of private moments, there’s violence, there are pets gone wild attacking people, there are nightmares and dreams walking around that are kind of like scary things you dream about at night when you’re in a situation that’s not so great, and animals from the wild as well, like moose, and tapirs, and snakes, rats. It just kind of grew from there. And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and I keep adding to it.

Do you plan on continuing to add to it?

Yeah for sure. I have a few environments that I’m working on. I have a zoo, it’s called Zoo Living, and it’s about what’s it like to live in a zoo, it’s still pretty weird because what is a zoo? A zoo can be a kind of prison, a zoo can be a human zoo, a circus, capture and display. I also have a Condo Living, it’s more civilized.

And each of these is one large piece made up of small bits?

Yeah. But I do sell them individually, though, the little pieces, because people get on and off the subway. If someone leaves I can replace them with somebody else.

Do you use the subway?

Oh yeah. I grew up using the subway. I’m from Toronto, Ontario. Our subway is nowhere near as extensive as hear in New York.

So your art is about life?

It’s about how circumstances can effect a life. So if you’re living in a condo, you get a dining room and a nice bed and everything, and your pet dog isn’t going to eat you. If you’re living in the subway then that all changes.

Do you know anyone who lives in the subway?

No. I know some pigeons though. I see a lot of pigeons. I was on the subway once in Toronto and the doors opened and a pigeon got on, and he just sits there hanging out, and of course when the subway stopped at the most expensive neighborhood and the doors opened, he gets off. He just walked off.

Perhaps not quite an “outsider” per se, Joseph Kuhajec rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century — Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and others who were still alive at the great axis of the modern era: the 60s. Kurhajec’s art seems to be poised at the moment a dream begins to evolve into a nightmare, when a benevolent god transposes into the body of a wild beast. He’s a matter-of-fact kind of man, and launched into a critique of art fair goers. Needless to say, he ruled.

JOSEPH KURHAJEC …People are too timid here! I’m actually not an outsider, I’m an independent. I live in France, but I’m in the Treadwell Museum of Fine Art. I have a studio in the Yucatan and I live there for three months a year, and I’m having a show February 9th, I’m showing in Paris at House St. Pierre, on the first of April.

Where are you from?

I’m born and raised in Wisconsin, actually. My family is from Slovakia. Kind of like Andy Warhol, same section. Tell me about your art. Tribal, tribal, tribal. African pieces, Congo pieces, that’s my main source, I’m making art 60 years now, I’ll be 80, I work full time, I’ve traveled all over the world.

Have you always done masks?

I’ve always done work that’s sort of tribal. Here, this is me as a young man, I looked like James Dean. Christo came to my studio in ’64, the guy who wraps buildings. I make fur sculptures, hair sculptures, there’s one in the Houston Museum, here’s a piece that was in the New School, they bought it and they gave it back to me because someone complained that it was too phallic. And that was years ago in ’64. I do a lot of political stuff, I did a lot of anti-war stuff. Anyway, I make art and I love making art. I make toys now because I like making toys. I met Alexander Calder in 1964 when he had his show at the Guggenheim, and I asked, “Why do you make toys?” and he said, “Because kids love ‘em and I love ‘em.” But the fact was that in 1930 when he was making them he didn’t make a dime at his show, but he became like the rest of them. I make wooden toys. These are my toys too, I love ‘em. It’s a pleasure being here because I haven’t marketed my work in the last 30 years, so it’s good for me, to show this kind of stuff.

Connected to the LAND gallery, an extension of The League Education & Treatment Center’s daily habilitation program for adult artists with developmental disabilities, Micheal Pellew’s work was one of the show-stoppers at the fair, and it was a unique delight that he was actually present to speak with. His work revels in pop culture, simple drawings of celebrities ad nauseam, their repetition and recreation a kind of pop era mantra matrix. Speaking with him was similar to looking at his work: a whirlwind of highly specific tv and radio references, as well as word associations that led him down colorful conversational paths. He’s hit the big-time.

Tell me about your art.

MICHEAL PELLEW I’m doing some big-time art, this one is on more numerous Kim Kardashian hairstyles, that one is the pinned bangs, there’s scared ones, Snookie. That one is a tribute to Hugh Hefner. I did 1990. Rock n’ Roll Heaven. Pop Art Era. VH1 Interview classics. I do sculptures, celebrity books, big books here and at home, I listen to music, I do audio cassettes, I’ve been recording audio cassettes since I was about 6 years old, 7 years old, I started recording music, the Paris Garage from around ’92, I have numerous audio cassettes. I have 60 audio cassettes, 30 in pop music.

Do you read comic books?

I don’t do comic books. I used to but not anymore. I went to the New York Trains Museum back in ’96, I used to like that a lot, I like the trains museum, I look at trains, I draw trains, I make homemade trains, and I discovered what it looked like old and new buses, and especially right now you’ve got the MTA Select Bus Service, the new trains do wifi everywhere, I don’t have wifi at the moment, my mom didn’t hook up the internet, we don’t have internet, we’ll get it very soon, I moved to a new house on east 76th street the hot water was acting up, my mom made hot water on the stove to put in the hot tub, in the garbage can to wash everything. When the shower came on, I got hot water, I got my cake and eat it too — cheesecake. I love my mom. I have weight issues, back in 92 I be callin Fat MF, Fat Hurkey, I was real upset, right now I’m eating healthy. Right now I listen to Q101.3, Classic Rock Station. I listen to Get the Layout with Carl Moore, Jim Curry morning show, 3 at 3, 80s rock, every Sunday night I listen to Little T’s Underground Garage, then I do, what else do I do? Breakfast with the Beatles. Every February 26th or 29th every year I do my youtube, I do models…

Models? What kind?

America’s Next Top Model, right now, Sophia is coming out. Phantom Lord is on every end of the drawing.

Who’s your favorite musical artist?

Everyone. Taylor Swift, The first album, Teardrops on My Guitar, Tears for Fears, I watch reality shows on Bravo and Entertainment, Kim and Kardashians.

What’s your favorite reality show?

Everything. Real Housewives, Beverly Hills, Jersey Shore. Right now I do Bump-its. I do Bump-its with the higher tease.

On yourself or you do it on a wig?

A girl, Snookie. I was watching it on tv, it made me realize, I have an idea, bobby pins.

Do you use the actual Bump-it?

I do hairspray. You do it yourself, you backcomb it? I do it myself, I get a little tease. Right now I’m gonna do socks. I do socks in it so it doesn’t fall.

So you use the sock as a filler in the hair to make it bigger?

Yeah.

Do you collect Barbies?

I don’t do Barbies, but I do toy cars. I do Hotwheels.

Do you collect anything else?

I’m working to make stuff, I make stuff. I do big drawings, I do cars, commissions. I’m trying to hold my money until Christmas.

Art

'Sacredness Is' at Fondazione Merz

Lena-Kuzmich CHIMERA, 2022, animation film and installation 9:30min.

The film has inspired many artists since its release nearly sixty years ago, and is currently serving as the basis for a new group exhibition, Sacro è, at the Fondazione Merz in Turin. Curated by Giulia Turconi and featuring work by artists Tiphaine Calmettes, Matilde Cassani, Giuseppe Di Liberto, Lena Kuzmich, Quỳnh Lâm, Tommy Malekoff, Lorenzo Montinaro, and GianMarco Porru, the show investigates the concept of sacredness as found in everyday things. Like Stamp’s character, the exhibiting artists seek to expose the potential for transformation and spiritual reinvention within the quotidian, and achieve this through works spanning performance, installation, sculpture, painting, and video.

Giuseppe Di Liberto, Sparge la morte, performance al Teatros del Canal, Madrid, 2022. Photo Pablo Lorente. Courtesy the artist.

Giuseppe Di Liberto, Ghirlanda, 2020. Courtesy the artist.

The exhibition’s opening coincided with a live performance by the artist Giuseppe Di Liberto on the evening of March 18th, 2024. The production, Sparge la morte (2022), was originally performed by Di Liberto and his brother Davide two years ago, and features music by the madrigal composer Carl Gesualdo. Inspired by a walk the brothers took in a cemetery in Naples, the piece’s choreography mimics the traditional death ritual of sin eating. Popular in border regions in the 18th and 19th centuries, sin eating involved the ceremonial eating and drinking in the presence of a corpse, and was believed to absolve the deceased of their wrongdoings.

The performance immediately set the tone for the rest of the exhibition with its stark portrayal of the extremes of life and death, ascension and degradation. As Gesualdo’s score resounded from behind a curtain, the brothers stalked up and down the Fondazione Merz’s spacious front room, retracing their steps in an obsessive trance and glancing out at the viewers as though from beyond the grave. Here, the fraternal aspect added an even more ominous edge to the already dark happenings: at times, it seemed that each brother might overcome the other entirely — and the audience as well. When the performance was over, the two hugged; still, a suggestion of danger and the possibility for a potential devouring lingered in the air.

Tiphaine Calmettes Hutte à mains, 2022. Photo Pierre Antoine.

Tiphaine Calmettes Ménhir à alcôve, 2022. Photo Pierre Antoine.

Echoing the themes of consumption and imbibing present in Di Liberto’s work, the French artist Tiphaine Calmettes presents Primordial Soup (2022), a clay and earth sculpture that doubles as a cauldron. Inside the cauldron is a vat of hot, blood-colored soup available for spectators to sample. In an exhibit inspired by a film that was condemned by the Vatican and led its director to be charged with indecency (Pasolini was eventually acquitted), it is the most overtly sexual work: its materials pass directly from the artist to the lips and into organs of the spectator. If this erotic transfer were not enough, the cauldron resembles a Venus figurine, with exteriorally-hung ladles that call to mind pendulous breasts.

Tommy Malekoff Desire Lines, 2019. Two channel digital video and sound 15:42 min. Courtesy of the artist.

In a separate room, a video work by New-York based, American artist Tommy Malekoff, Desire Lines (2019), plays on an endless loop. Filmed across fourteen states between August 2017 and March 2019 on a handheld camcorder, the fifteen-minute film is described as an “ode to the surreal potential of parking lots across America”, and focuses solely on the aforementioned liminal space. A kind of reimagining of the famed John Cheever story “The Swimmer” (1964), in which a probably deranged man decides to swim home only through his neighbors’ backyard pools, Desire Lines criss-crosses the U.S. by means of a different, but similarly common landscape.

In the film, we witness a variety of scenarios play out across multiple parking lots, including but not limited to: a firework display set off by shirtless teenage boys, a herd of iguanas passing idly through, a prayer circle that release a rosary of balloons, a military drill in full action, a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty juggling batons, a beer drinking competition, kids arriving by horse at a Sioux Nation shopping center, and a solo dancer using a cardboard box as his makeshift stage. Like Pasolini, Malekoff trains his lens on the banal, finding there an explosion of previously untapped potential and people desperately waiting to be seen.

Lena-Kuzmich CHIMERA, 2022, animation film and installation 9:30min. Sound Design by Leonard Prochazka. Graphic Design by Winona Hudcová

Despite the excellence of the work by Di Liberto, Calmettes, Malekoff, and the other artists, it was the Austrian Lena Kuzmich who best surmised the central themes of Sacro è. In their video installation, Chimera (2022), Kuzmich examines queer ecology and nonbinary life within nature, questioning what defines humans as a species. As the video came to a close, bold, all capitalized letters flashed across a screen in the Fondazione Merz’s basement: LIVE LOVE FUCK DECAY TRANSCEND. Pasolini, one imagines, might just approve.

Sacro è, is open at the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy from the 18th of March to the 16th of June, 2024. Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) will be screened in accordance with the exhibition in the Fondazione’s cinema room on the 23rd of March, the 18th of May and the 8th of June at 4pm, the 10th of April, the 8th of May and the 29th May at 5pm, and the 21st of April and the 16th of June at 11.30am.

Art

Tali Lennox Walks Between Worlds

Belladonna, 2023

The results are just as vivid as her psychic landscape. Rendered in oil on canvas, her latest series merges mythological and folkloric references with Lennox’s own symbolic lexicon. There are shells and shrouded figures; bodies of water and gleaming oysters; crying eyes and rays of light. Women’s bodies appear in a state somewhere between pain and pleasure, tension and release, orgasm and apocalypse. Evoking the beauty and savagery of the natural world, Lennox probes our contemporary ennui and enduring fascination with the end times—finding solace in the idea of nature as the highest power, and surrendering to its cycles of creation and destruction. Currently on view at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles for her latest solo exhibition, Tremors, the paintings invite viewers to join Lennox in the space between. After all, Lennox says, “Life is but a dream."

Themes of apocalypse and end times are very front of mind these days. What do you see as the role of art in helping people process this?

I believe that painting has the power to open up pockets within us where we can access the things we’re fearful of. The show’s title, Tremors, is referencing this sort of secret fear within me, which I think everyone can relate to right now. We are in a time of general unease; there’s this sense of potential disaster or oncoming decline. I started contemplating what it means to tune into that powerlessness and the feeling of surrender. From there, I started thinking about the bigger picture: contemplating the history of the universe and the fact that the world has always had such dramatic huge cycles of change beyond what I can even comprehend.

For the past two years, my boyfriend and I have gone to sleep listening to a series called The Fall of Civilizations, which is about different empires from the past and how they fell. When you start thinking about that scope of time, you realize that above and beyond our experiences, nature has always been the puppeteer. When you also bring the element of magic or fantasy into the equation, it leads you back to the notion that life is but a dream. At the end of the day, if there have been civilizations that have lasted for centuries and centuries, and then suddenly they’re just gone, what was it to begin with?

Within the show, I’ve tried to express the tension between the minutiae of internal experiences and the expansion of the external—[finding the] fusion of that within nature. The metamorphosis of nature, the power of nature overcoming humans, this dual savagery or beauty that nature holds, and the question of, Is this a utopia or an apocalypse?

There is a meaning behind everything I do, so there are lots of little doorways to open if one pleases. It’s like a secret within a secret.

Mythology is central to the series. Where did you draw inspiration from existing folkloric legends, and which symbols and motifs arose from your own experiences in the world?

At one point, I was in Greece and I was going to quite a few caves. Some of the most profound, mesmerizing experiences I’ve ever had have been in caves and cenotes. It’s this primal feeling; it’s womb-like, it’s elemental, it’s ancient.

I love this notion of the great return, and I symbolize it with shells, with water, with oysters—which, of course, could be interpreted as female anatomy. It’s like the birth of Aphrodite; it reminds one of coming back to the ocean, to water, to the womb.

Tell me about the books or historical sources that inspired your approach.

There’s this very large, very old book from 16th-century Germany called the Augsburg Book of Miracles. It’s full of gouache paintings of very surreal apocalyptic scenes. There are comets, there are swarms of locusts, there are strange mythological creatures, there are images where it’s raining flesh and blood, there are rainbows. It just has this sense of mysticism, wonderment, and total unease. Nobody knows who made the book—it’s a mystery.

I also read a book called Medieval Bodies, and learned that in the middle ages, there were a lot of interesting parallels being drawn between human body parts and parts of nature. The lungs are like the wings of a bird, symbolizing flight, breathing, movement, and life force. The nervous system and the brain are like tree roots. It goes back to this kind of external, internal relationship between nature and the human body. So I think that’s also where I got a lot of these motifs of shells and barnacles and metamorphosis.

How much are you consciously crafting these layers of meaning, and how much of the work is free-associative?

I’ve never wanted to create paintings that make people feel one singular thing. I think it’s fascinating to let people go on their internal journeys with what these symbols might portray for them. There is a meaning behind everything I do, so there are lots of little doorways to open if one pleases. It’s like a secret within a secret.

For example, Touching the Vessel, that painting with the silver metalwork, is a reference to Betony Vernon’s jewel tools. To me, the work she does is like a metaphor: she’s making these beautiful objects that allow people to erupt in a sense, to open, to break through. These objects are like a symbol of physical transcendence. So they were a metaphor for orgasm and out-of-body experience. And I love that the same motif that conveys disaster and chaos can also be a symbol of pleasure and transcendence.

<em>Touching the Vessel</em>, 2023 — *Touching the Vessel*, 2023

I’m curious about your own experiences—have you had any out-of-body experiences, or experiences that completely shifted your perception of the world?

Through methods of alternative healing, I have had experiences that made me feel that my sense of reality, my sense of existence in the world, was turned inside out. I’ve had these moments come not just from beauty but from pain. Again, it’s like life cycles: You get these breakages in nature, these massive ruptures, and after that, something transforms. Before the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis, a caterpillar has to turn into goo.

We can’t live in a state of eruption or transcendence all the time; it’s always going to be temporary. But human beings are constantly being led by the longing for a feeling of spiritual openness and enlightenment. When I think of this human longing, of searching and looking for a sense of eruption, there’s also a great vulnerability in that. Every time I’ve had these experiences of rupturing and healing, it always came with a torrent of grief. That’s also where I get this term from like expulsion: this sense of being cracked open. Loss has led to the most painful and the most beautiful transformative experiences of my life. There’s an analogy I always think of: somebody gives you a set of hot, rusted keys, and nobody wants to hold them because they burn your hands. But then when you do hold them and sit with the discomfort til they cool, you can use the key as a tool to open up new parts of yourself.

You said in another interview that you’re attracted to vessels and objects that have these connections to other narratives. Could you elaborate on that?

I find it fascinating how human beings try to connect to spirit: this striving to feel more than body, more than mind. I’ve always been enamored with objects of worship—how as humans we create these shrines. When we all collectively put energy into one object, projecting all this thought and emotional dependence onto a material thing, it’s like a form of magic—it almost comes alive. It means everything, but it also means nothing. Similarly, these paintings can mean so much when I’m doing them, but they also mean nothing; they’re just pigment on canvas. There’s such poetry to that, and it also relates like objects of worship: How much potency can you put in one piece of material?

My work as a painter is such a private experience; I’m someone who gets addicted to being alone, and I’ve had, in the past, obsessions with building little shrines and sitting with objects and collecting trinkets, treasures, remnants. And there are also portals to at least make us feel like we are traveling to another realm. New age groups use holy water, like in ancient cultures, and I think it’s beautiful—but there’s also an element of make-believe, a childishness to that. And I think perhaps that’s why my paintings carry a sense of unease but also belief, wonderment, and a bit of madness as well. I wanted the show to be a journey, almost like a fairy tale: how there are moments of beauty and sacrilege and fear and perhaps a little bit of horror. I want it to feel like you are in the midst of a spell.

Left: Love Belt, 2023

Right: Warm Chains, 2023

Left: Fool’s Arcadia, 2023

Right: Vial, 2023

Your paintings are so dreamlike they make me wonder: What are your dreams like?

When I was a child, I would be extremely taken by my dreams. I had different phases of sleepwalking, where I would walk around my house with my eyes open. Sometimes I would even wake up and be conscious, but I would see everything [as though I was] still in the dream—all my visuals were in a different place, but at the same time, I was coherent. One time I woke up and I was very much convinced I was Alice in Wonderland. I even woke my dad up and said I don’t know what to do, I’m growing out of our house! I remember being quite embarrassed about it. Another time I was walking up and down my house, and I couldn’t stop moving my arms. It was almost like Sydenham's chorea, that jerky kind of bodily illness at the turn of the century.

So yeah—lots of things have come out in dreamtime! I think dreams are so interesting, and kind of like painting: a process in which the psychological phantasmagoria of daily experience is regurgitated. When I would sleepwalk as a child, I was between a state of dream and conscious reality. And it goes back to these spaces I love: the in-between space, the void between two realms. Most of the paintings, if they’re in a landscape, it’s always twilight. It’s my favorite time, that space between night and day, between the lightness and the darkness. The day’s ended, it’s already like a faded memory… It’s already happened, and you can’t go back to it—and then it’s the mystery of the night.

Tali Lennox: Tremors is on view at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles through April 6.

Art

Through Ezekiel's Peephole

March 27, 2024

In “Footnote to Howl,” Allen Ginsberg writes, “The world is holy!…The bum’s as holy as the seraphim!” Filipino London-based photographer Ezekiel took that sentiment and ran. With the second installation of their photobook series, SMUT, Ezekiel puts an eye on the voyeurs so often seen in gay porn, taking a campy yet refreshingly reverent view through the literal and metaphorical peephole.

Ezekiel delves into different voyeurist archetypes within masculine queerness, featuring characters like the Cruiser, the Neighbor, the Roommate. While voyeurism is a recurring theme in pornographic narratives, true voyeurism, characterized by an unknowing subject, is rarely achieveable. Nowadays, everyone know’s theyre being watched, everyone wants to be watched, and everyone’s in on the joke. Can anyone truly be a voyeur if we’re all just watching ourselves?

Buy SMUT Volume II: Voyeurism here

By Izzy Capulong
Photography by Ezekiel

We meet at Friend Editions, where Ezekiel's photos and books are displayed. In talking about the Cruising story, they note the support they received from their parents. Both of us come from Catholic school and FIlipino immigrants — we were both rightfully surprised. Apparently their mom is still trying to get them to become a priest. I’m in a suit, they’re in a skirt, the situational irony is not lost upon either of us. But, even if their parents didn’t get their queer erotic photography, the support is still endearing. Apparently, while shooting, Ezekiel’s father had been excited to drive everyone around, beaming after hearing there was a famous gay pornstar in his backseat.

While Volume 1 of SMUT consists of more documentary style snapshots of the lives of female friends who are sex workers, Volume 2 is a more of an editorial. Yet, as has been notably lacking in the fashion industry, there’s a level of respect and intimacy between photographer and model, evident in how Ezekiel speaks of the production of their book. They reminisce on each model by name — friends, pornstars, friends who are pornstars, gogoboys, and someone’s silver fox uncle who was discovered at a wedding — who was apparently so excited to get spanked on camera, that he bought a train ticket to London for the entire day.

office — What was your first introduction to porn?

Ezekiel — I would say my first intro to ‘pornographic’ material was when we immigrated to the UK in the early 2000s and the top shelves of British corner shops (aka bodegas) would be lined with ‘Lads Mags’ such as Zoo and Nuts magazines, which would often have a half-naked or provocatively posed woman on the front cover. In terms of my first pornographic video, I remember it quite vividly. It was a homemade tape of some old guy masturbating that was uploaded onto Xvideos, which I secretly watched on the family computer whilst the rest of my family were out (sorry Mum and Dad).

Is there a relationship between the desire to observe and the desire to be observed?

Absolutely, especially in queer culture. Gay people have a tendency to be always looking for people like them, whether that be in a sexual manner or in a way to find comfort within spaces that are dominantly heterosexual. We just have a natural ability to find and gravitate towards each other in any situation. In my opinion, to be observed is to be acknowledged and seen, and the desire to be observed is a desire to exist.

Some people theorize that identity construction relies on performance for an audience — whether it be real or imaginary. Do you believe in the internal voyeur?

That’s a very interesting take, I think the idea of identity construction via performance is prevalent now more than ever especially due to the digital age we live in. Everyone’s always performing (whether they like it or not) for some sort of audience. Some could say that day-to-day life is inherently performative, or even just being an adult; where you have to sort of perform the idea that you have a career and your whole life figured out. So to answer your question, yes, I do believe in an internal voyeur because it’s hard for the idea of external voyeurs not to seep inwards.

What's your voyeurist fantasy?

At this moment, my ideal fantasy is to not be perceived in any way shape or form. Basically just don’t look at me, but maybe do… But don’t tell me you’re watching of course, or else this wouldn’t be a voyeurist fantasy at all.

Some photos involve Ezekiel themself, adding a third layer of observation and making us question where we stand on the spectrum of watcher to watched. Ezekiel does this story referencing the phenomena of Sleep Streaming, where people will pretend to sleep on camera and undress as more donations come in. Performers feign ignorance and pretend to be aloof to the fact that they are being watched, despite the fact that they themselves were the ones who set up the stream, who positioned the camera, and who are secretly conscious and awaiting viewers. Is that not the case for the digital age? Are we all not just walking around SoHo hoping for some street photographer to catch us looking unbothered and offhandedly stylish? Are we all not subconscioiusly performing for the thousands of newly minted party photographers that seem to keep popping up around the city? Are we not all sometimes our own neighbor in the window?