at this point I saw the limit to where I imagined this kind
of context was going. I could have kept doing it but I had
given so much of my time and energy for 6 years and I got
fried. I then became curious about other ways to work. I
had been performing in galleries and museums and other
“art” contexts sporadically the whole time. There are way
less of them compared to “pure music” contexts, so by
volume they were the less common context to perform in,
but I played them whenever I could and occasionally opportunities would come up to exhibit objects. Barr was always about the performance and so I began to wonder if I
could make an object that would function in my absence
better than a record or poster or music object. This is when
I started making the sculptures.
Your work often blurs the line between photography and
sculpture. What inspires this choice?
The first “art objects” I made were text heavy. They were
transcriptions of the songs I used to perform and I don’t
think that any of them worked as well as the audio recordings. I found photography to be an interesting and potential
laden way to deal with narrative as an object. As far as the
“crash” sculptures, the ones that people are maybe more
familiar with deal with narrative, but their status as objects
draws attention to this continuum of inter-sincerity/intrasincerity. Between sincere and insincere there is a wide
range. Sometimes you mean something, a feeling or an idea,
but you have to present it in a way that is not honest. For
example, did this interview really happen as an interview?
In this case it did, but if I had written out both parts and
pretended to be you, as long as my answers were what I
was hoping to convey, would it mean that I meant them any
less? The sculptures are super fake, in that they were not
rammed or smashed together at all. They take a long time
to assemble, as the event which they would imply, the one
in which one frame somehow impales several others never
actually happened, but instead there is a slow assembly process by which that moment, or the effect of what you might
imagine that moment was like, is faked. Repetition is a big
part of my project, partially as a means to draw attention to
these things and their status in this continuum.
The larger sculptures, which the photographs become part
of sometimes, are a way to deal with space and set up
other more involved experiences. The more architectural
wall set ups that use drywall can hold the works of other
artists as well as create a navigable (experiential) space
for the audience.
Can you talk about your work at ANP Quarterly? What
was the impetus for this publication? How did it evolve
over time?
Pat Tenore (P.M.) founded this skateboard/surfboard/ultimate fighting/”fashion” clothing company called RVCA
sometime in the early 2000’s. In 2004 he asked Ed Templeton, an artist and professional skateboarder, if he would
like to start a free art magazine. Ed was too busy to take
it all on alone, but said that if Pat hired myself and Aaron
Rose we could all do it together. He hired us as editors and
Casey Holland as art director/designer and let us do whatever we wanted for seven years. The magazine was full color
and he never censored us. It was a paying job and incredible
freedom for seven years. I cannot even tell you how thankful
I am to have been able to do this. In 2012 Ed inadvertently
quit over the course of a skateboard industry sponsorship
transition and Aaron and I edited one issue without him. It
was very difficult as Aaron was — I’ll try to describe it the
best way I can — Aaron’s interests were getting further and
further away from “art” and more into this kind of quest for
a fiercely hetero normative portrayal of “sexy” as he was
trying to navigate his career path away from art curating
and writing to somewhere else. I respect that he was life
transitioning, but our positions on things were becoming
irreconcilable. Our interests were divergent and simultaneously I found myself in a place that I could support myself
from art, so I decided to split and took the leap to became a
“professional artist.” I must reiterate, I cannot tell you how
fortunate I feel to have been able to work on that magazine
for all those years and leaving Casey Holland as a colla borator on that project was incredibly difficult.
Some of your works feature the back of the canvas prominently displayed. Why is this interesting to you both visually and symbolically?
I had to figure out how to make frames in a way that they
had their own innate armature which could support the
crash pieces. People asked how the crash pieces were
made. To show how the frames were made, I made the first
leaning wall piece. The wall was constructed of the frames
screwed to each other, face to face. I love process, but from
that I discovered that I liked the backs just as much as the
fronts. I like them as elements, I like them as sculpture, as
painting. I like that they look like the backs of paintings,
and occasionally I have used different kind of masonite to
play on this. Beyond the reasons that I find them interesting conceptually to use, I suppose I kind of like them how
one might like a sweater that they find aesthetically pleasing: like, “Yeah. Okay, yeah.”
Layering of images, texts and frames is an important element of your work. Why is this process significant to
you? How did it come about?
I was showing the straightforward text pieces I mentioned
before, and then was invited to do a solo show in this tiny
space in Los Angeles called 2nd Cannons. It was a gallery
for a few years run by the artist Brian Kennon as an outreach of his artist book imprint of the same name. The gallery was the width of a standard sliding glass door, maybe
6 feet wide, and only about two feet deep. It had a sliding
glass door in front of it and you looked in from outside. It
was in the hallway of a building that had a few other kind of
big LA galleries, but it had a very loose, artist friendly feel.
I was determined to show these three items that were of
fixed size. I was trying to work out this narrative as demonstrated by a cancelled tour poster for a tour I cancelled to