Cats play a significant role in your creative life. Incorporating them into your works, is it a representation of daily life for you, or is it a kind of transposition of yourself?
Cats have been in my work for over a decade, and in my life since I can remember. The further I get the more I realise they’re the perfect container for how I want to talk about my world. They offer a different perspective on domesticity, banality, existentialist space. And they’ve been tied into culture so long that cats can jump from historical, to personal and anecdotal, to meme in second. That danger of being perceived of as “unserious” or frivolous because of my persistent cat use only makes me want to do more of it. Telling people, I make work about cats, can be disarming and hopefully creates some misdirection, setting kitschy preconceptions in their minds. It’s another version of the doubling from earlier, expectations being subverted by reality. Within that furry framework is a versatile and malleable narrative and formal device. They have an inherent theatricality and fantastical side, full of whimsy and superstition, allowing room for all the characterisation, psychology, and references I’m interested in.
Your works remind me of the dream sphere. Have you ever used dreams as a point of inspiration? If not, are there themes that you unconsciously incorporate into your artworks?
I grind my teeth and get into arguments in my dreams, which is not what I want for my work (although making art that invokes teeth grinding could be interesting). The one part of my dreams I really like is the frenetic scene changing, one dream usual has at least three or four different locations. Although uninteresting visually, I like how things are just one or two clicks off normality, psychologically soupy but still recognisable. Something like the dissociation that comes from visiting your childhood haunts and realising you misremembered almost everything about that place.
Thematically I’ve been thinking about obsessiveness, a broad stroke but one that is a good umbrella. There’s an absurdity in trying to represent that. Cats are good at this. Culturally we all know about the mental health implications of someone who hoards cats. The cats are symptoms, not the root of problem.
As can be seen from your career, you’re a person in constant creative ferment. Do you already have ideas for your next project?
On December 2nd, I opened a solo show at International Waters in Brooklyn, NY that I’m really excited about. I turned the gallery walls into giant cat’s cradles, using 6000 feet of rope to weave tangled patterns on the wall. I interlaced 1000 catnip toy mice in the rope and then hung paintings on top of it. I’m very interested in creating shows that have two distinctive lives, in-person experience and digital representation. When the show is flattened into pictures, the content doesn’t change, but the way you frame it steers someone deliberately through the show one way. Whereas in person it’s a total immersive experience. I named the show, “My Face is a River”, kind of gloomy and melodramatic reflection of where my head is right now. Matt Taber and Trang Tran, who run the space, are incredibly generous and supportive as gallerists and people, and together I think we made something very special and memorable. Aside from that, other things are developing, but nothing is concrete yet.