On communicating with images

Architecture is a recurring theme in your practice. Do you have specific memories of when it became a fixation? What did that feel like for you?

I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit: not necessarily formative architecture memories, but what buildings do to consciousness in relation to spatial memory. For myself, memory is spatial. Part of that is thinking about how my thought processes are spatial, too. Some of the first dreams I remember having as a kid were spatial. I also remember the experience of being a child and having dreams about spaces that I was in, like a library or a school or grocery store or something. And having it be the same, and part of it be different. If you want to drill down to the basics, that is a realization. What has always stuck with me is that [physical] spaces in the world also occupy psychic space… Also, my early comics were very much about navigating a world. How does it grow around us? And how do humans build that, within an ecosystem?

You’ve recently had pieces from your Memory Palaces series featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, alongside a mural that’s visible in the main atrium. We’re in this moment where transness is so overly scrutinized, but there’s a quality to your work that feels like it would disorient straight people, while drawing queers in. How do you think of that dilemma?

The fuzzy borders of visibility are pretty interesting to me. It’s so energizing and it’s so necessary. In terms of architecture, there’s this revolting architecture of a bunker that I’ve been trying to think through. There’s so much in the world that is about hiding out or whatever, and I’m like, this is not the future and this is not survival. The bunker is a lie, is I guess what I’m saying. I’ve been thinking about world building in game formats and trying to figure out if there’s something cohesive there, with the thesis that the bunker is a lie.

You’ve lived a lot of lives and moved around a bit. Can you share a bit of your life trajectory and how it’s related to your practice?

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I went to art school in the late ’90s in Providence, Rhode Island at Rhode Island School of Design. In my 20s, I really moved around a lot. I had a film job and I lived in Chicago for a while, but could also work in New York or LA—so had a tri-coastal job for a minute. I also did a tattoo apprenticeship in the Bay Area for a few years; I feel like my life was pretty chaotic during that time. That’s also when I bought a school bus that ran on vegetable oil and traveled on that basically until it broke down. It broke down close enough to Chicago that I moved back to Chicago, and that was an incredibly fruitful time. That was when I worked at Quimby’s [a zine shop] for a few years.

There was a point where there was family stuff happening, but also the winters in Chicago were crushing me a bit. I think the balance of my life was crushing me a little bit, because I was working full-time and also sort of transitioning to having a fine art career and a studio practice and making work. There just weren’t enough hours in the day to do that and also be kind to people in my life, or to have people in my life. I tried to go to grad school in LA. I was part of a program, the art program at USC that kind of collapsed in on itself… My whole class dropped out of that program together because of its implosion under our feet. From there, I moved out to the High Desert in California, which is where I’ve been pretty based for the past decade, until recently.

I think there’s shifts happening in my practice, but painting and drawing have been at its core for over a decade. I feel that getting more slippery—there’s things I’m interested in that I haven’t had the time or focus to do, like installations and interaction. That has led me to go back to school to finish an MFA, and so I’m in Vancouver now. At this point, I’m mid-40s, so it’s a memory game to be like, what happened? I feel like this is another thing I’ve been thinking about: I was very lucky to physically travel a lot in my 20s. There’s an in-person web of friends and acquaintances that doesn’t stop echoing through my life. That is different from what the internet does, I’ll say that.

Having dropped out of your previous MFA program, how do you understand your relationship to institutions and the compromises they force you to make as a creative person?

I think it’s really squirrely. For context, it was a small program that was fully funded at the time, at a very expensive school. There were seven people in my class, and halfway through the year we heard that the kind of funding that we had been promised was no longer intact, and then proceeded to do a full semester of negotiating with an institution. It’s almost laughable to call it negotiating because it was meeting and raising our points, showing documentation, being clear about what we wanted—and facing the snakiness of how compromised institutions can be.

Coming to collective decisions about it was also interesting, because everyone came to a dropout decision from a different place. But it was also clear that that was the response to what was going on. I think that has given me, hopefully, some measure of a bullshit detector. But of course there’s new flavors of bullshit constantly being invented and enacted, so I maybe have not tasted the latest maple bacon bullshit. It’s shaped how I engage with institutions too, making me think or scheme about, “What is my life without this institution and without these resources?” And to understand that I may have access to resources through an institution.

But what is my plan if that’s not the case? How do I live and what do I move towards? If it’s something where [an institution says], “You can be part of this as long as you’re silent on this,” or, “You can be part of this as long as you don’t fight us back about whatever…” It feels like I’m trying to understand where I can act within institutions, and also when it’s time to go. A lot of them are extremely big, and far more powerful than I. So there’s the group action, and that’s always where you’re going to find power in an institution, as an individual. Not as an individual, but as part of collective causes to change the space. But they’re also ready to lose as well. Not to be a big bummer or anything, but it’s not necessarily a series of triumphs or anything. It’s trying to keep learning how to act and to act with people.

What’s your gut-level response to these moments of upheaval throughout your life? How do you flow through change?

I feel most articulate in a visual language, which is why I’ve been working in comics and why I’ve been a painter. When I can’t decipher what I want to communicate or question, and also just straight up communicate it, that is usually a point in my life where I’m like, “Okay, there’s something that needs to change about how I’m living, or making work, or both.” I’m a pretty slow processor of things and it is reflected in how I do things. Almost everything I work on is slow because it’s a way of thinking through things.

When I feel like I’m losing the plot [with paintings or in life], I don’t think it means anything except I’m scared, or I feel stuck. Which is a valid thing. That feels much more personal of a place to get to, and much less of a productive thing to share. I mean, I feel very open in admitting that in so many ways I’m very confused about the world and how to act.

And at the same time, I don’t think that that’s at the root of what my work can bring out. I appreciate it when it helps me think through things, just how we were talking earlier about learning to think about space. My work taught me, as I was making it, how I was thinking. I think I move to change my life when something is falling short. I can also feel ideas pressing in that I can’t access yet, if that makes sense. Like I’m not pushing myself to make the connections I need to make.

You recently made an illustration of the Two of Wands tarot card for an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York. Do you like tarot as a visual language for understanding?

Not always, but it has been a useful tool for me for a long time. Thinking through how chaotic my 20s were, that was when I learned how to use a tarot deck. It was really important to help isolate what I was thinking about, or for giving me a springboard for everything in my life. I would say it’s a great tool in my life right now.

The Two of Wands piece [happened when] I had the opportunity to do an etching with a small press in Central Illinois, Manneken Press. That’s working with a master printmaker on etching, which I hadn’t done since 2000. So it was really amazing to get into that technical process. Also, that had been a card that had been a guidance card, in terms of thinking about and reckoning with history, facing a future—that’s what kind of guided that print. Tarot is central to [my partner’s] practice, so whereas I just use that as a tool, I’m also exposed to it quite a bit because she works with it as kind of a core of her art practice.

It’s such a great thing to break out of spoken, written language to dive into [thinking about], “What is a resonance in another way?” Why can a gesture move us in a way that a word can’t? Just remembering that there’s all these communications of the world, and ways to bring an energy in. A couple years ago, I had a dream where I was handed this pretty amazing illuminated manuscript and asked to continue it.

Oh shit.

I woke up weeping. I’m almost crying now. Part of it is how I paint. I’m not a big gestural painter. I paint like I’m illuminating a manuscript. I can’t convey the full breadth of the dream… But it just feels like there’s a core that I hold my work up to. I’m like, “Does this continue the work that I was handed in that dream?” I’m not letting that totally control me, but also it feels like a weird psychic gold standard, of a sort.

The first words in Magnus Hirschfeld’s book The Transvestites, which is the first published use of trans language to describe us, are “Motto: there are more phenomena and emotions than words.” It feels like dreams are an example of that kind of communication. I appreciate that in your work, too: going well beyond the limits of language.**

Yeah, or it doesn’t necessarily get read in the way that we read written language… It’s communication maybe, rather than language. Like how do things communicate themselves? How do people communicate themselves? Writing is one of the most concrete ways of that, but it’s also a limitation. The way that we build machine systems is also very concrete, and, in that way, can be limiting. I also have a birthday wish for images, where I want them to hold their own power and their own communication. I don’t want it to be casual, maybe, is the word I’m looking for. I want the communication of images to be a recognized communication in the world and amongst humans especially. Because I think it’s so tricky and disposable right now. Does that make sense? I’m not finding words, but it’s a breadcrumb on the thought trail I’m trying to go down.