The special pull-out print that accompanies the Summer 2023 “Icons” issue of Art in America features o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin), a painting that Jemison made around 1974. Below, the artist tells A.i.A. about the context in which it was conjured—and how the work wound up in parts unknown.

As told to A.i.A. In 1971 I got invited to be in an exhibition at what was then known as the Museum of the American Indian [before it changed to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian] in New York. It was the first time I showed with other Native artists. Around then, I was just beginning to search for more about my identity. I grew up in an all-Seneca community, but there wasn’t a lot of what I would call “cultural immersion” then.  

I’d just started a job as a counselor for children who had attention-deficit disorder. The kids would get a timeout period during the day, and I started spending a lot more time outdoors with them. I started to really look at the natural world for patterns and ideas for my work as I was contextualizing it within our cultural traditions. 

I was looking at trees and how they had influenced our way of life. Before the first trade occurred, everything we used had to be made. We manufactured our own cooking pots, our own tools, our own utensils. I was learning about all of that, but more in the form of reading than through active participation. 

The next step was to spend time meeting people in my community who I had known but hadn’t seen in quite some time. I also began to exhibit with other Native artists on a regular basis. Actually, there was an article in Art in America in 1972 by Lloyd Oxendine, who wrote about 23 contemporary Native artists. The Today Show interviewed him about the article, and we did an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum [“Native North American Art: Contemporary Works by American Indian Artists”] that year too. That all pushed me to really look at the kind of iconography that I wanted in my artwork and that spoke to my identity. 

My painting o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) falls right at the nexus of me revisiting questions like: Who am I? What are the traditions that I come from? What does it mean to be a contemporary Seneca? What are our issues and concerns? In the Seneca language we have this phrase Jõhe’hgõh, which means “the foods that sustain us.” There are three primary foods that we raised to be the source of our sustenance: corn, beans, and squash. The pumpkin is a squash, and it’s one of those vegetables that can be stored and then used during long winter months. 

The background of the painting represents tree bark, but it’s painted in an abstract manner with colors that would not be present in an actual tree. I wanted to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. Rendering what in reality is heavily textured as flat makes for a kind of breakdown of the picture plane.

This work was stolen after an exhibition at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City in 1983. There was a break-in, and they stole o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) and another painting of mine, both of which I never recovered. A friend of mine actually found the paintings after they were stolen; there was a guy trying to sell them down on Canal Street. They wound up getting confiscated by the New York City police, and I went to the station house in Tribeca and identified the paintings as mine. It was like a scene out of Barney Miller: I’m standing in the middle of the police station, and every cop that comes in says, “Who’s the ahhhtist? Are you the ahhhtist?” The next guy comes in and asks the same question.

So I’m thinking, I’m going to get these back! But the police took them to where they took stolen material. I can’t recall if it was Long Island City or Rikers Island, but, in any case, I went and tried to go through the process to recover them. When I got there and asked, a guy looked at me and said, “Do you see this warehouse? Do you think you could find them here?” I walked away shaking my head.  

Six paintings by Taylor—all made between 2006 and 2018—feature in the tour, with each show rotating through four of them on an alternating basis.

“We wanted a kind of show that didn’t depend on LED walls or anything like that—just backdrops revealing themselves over the course of the show in a lo-fi, theatrical, old-Broadway type of way,” said Mike Carson, the show director and co-designer with Lamar and his longtime collaborator Dave Free. “When you go to a festival or a show, there are things you’re always going to see. One thing I love about Kendrick and Dave is that they’re always like, ‘How do we flip that on its head?’ If people at a festival see the same thing for eight hours in a day and then you come on at 11 p.m., how can you refresh the palate?”

Lamar met Taylor during a studio visit last year and proposed the idea later when trying to figure out how to follow up his elaborate “Big Steppers Tour” with something more pared-down and direct. “Henry’s a fan of Kendrick and there’s a lot of mutual respect and admiration for each other,” Carson said of the two fellow Angelenos. “They were both really excited.”

Together with Lamar and Free, Carson mocked up a sketch of what they imagined, and then Taylor and his team at the gallery Hauser & Wirth sent images of artworks they thought might make sense. Once that was whittled down, Carson figured out how to enlarge the works and print them on a polyester silk surface that could be trucked around on the road and unrolled to star onstage at showtime.

“Some of the art we had printed at 60 feet wide by 34 feet tall, so you see the details of this stuff bigger than ever,” Carson said. “On the poly silk, the colors pop, and it’s also light enough to travel with and safe enough that, if it blows like crazy, it doesn’t knock Kendrick off the stage.”

Taylor’s works—his art also stars in Pharrell Williams’s recent debut menswear collection for Louis Vuitton—started appearing in Lamar’s show at Primavera Sound in Barcelona in June, and featured on Friday night at Lollapalooza in Chicago. More shows will follow in the fall in North America and Asia.

Throughout the tour’s run, Carson said, the art of Henry Taylor has been a suitable co-star for Lamar and his incomparable tales told in the form of rap.

“Henry’s use of color and the storytelling within his art is really impressive, but there’s something about it that feels like homemade and attainable that I think that speaks to the stories of the characters in his art,” Carson said. “We all see a lot of things that are so polished and overly stylized or overly computer-generated, but I really feel the stories in Henry’s art. As a Black man, I definitely see a lot of my history and a lot of my family’s history—and I’m sure a lot of other people do too.”

As the exhibition heads into its final weeks before closing on August 13, Kline talked to Art in America about his experience of the show over time, what he learned from its reception, and what he’s thinking for the future.

So much of your work is rooted very specifically in the time it was made, to the extent that some of it can be called “dated.” While seeing your show I thought a lot about how the notion of art that is dated, though it sometimes gets cast with a dismissive or negative connotation, can in fact be very valuable—and maybe even more valuable—for being so. Do you have any thoughts on this? 

All art is a product of the time in which it’s made. Everything becomes dated eventually. I try to work with this instead of against it. For me, time-specificity is just as interesting as site-specificity. You can deliberately connect a work to a time in the same way that you can connect it to a place. It doesn’t make sense to me to describe 2023 using slang from 1971.

The earliest works in my Whitney show were basically period pieces set in the present. Formally, I was looking at what aspects of the time I was working in were specific to that moment. For instance, what made 2008 or 2011 or 2013—the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession that followed—different from all other times? Design, architecture, fashion—an era’s surfaces—can tell you a lot about that time’s economics and culture. The fact that today the interiors of so many houses and restaurants are being painted in gray institutional colors speaks volumes. 

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What have you taken away from the ways the exhibition has been received? Have any reactions surprised you, or recast anything about your own work for you personally? 

The biggest surprise for me was how much people have responded to the video interviews with blue-collar workers. I didn’t expect those interviews to be the most popular videos in the show. Every time I walk into that gallery, there’s a big crowd listening to people who worked at FedEx or in chain restaurants or as cleaners of hotel rooms talk about their lives. Middle-class people see these workers a lot in the background but very rarely hear their voices. It makes me think that if more of these stories could make it out into the wider culture, maybe it would be harder for politicians and voters to dismiss working people and their concerns.

The show included a discussion event titled “A Century of Displacement: Climate & Mass Migration,” organized in collaboration with artist and conservationist Haley Mellin and featuring scientist Benjamin Strauss, human-rights advocate Amali Tower, and writer David Wallace-Wells. What did you glean from that? 

The most frequent questions that came up were about what people can do, and the answer again and again came down to voting for candidates who take climate seriously. Yes, if you can avoid flying, gasoline-powered cars, and red meat, this will help. But the impact of personal actions like that is dwarfed by the consequences of actions and policies of governments and corporations. 

The media does a really poor job of communicating with the general public about what the climate crisis will look like in our own lives and how soon we can expect things to get bad. They also don’t do a good job at explaining what’s still possible in terms of mitigation—and the difference that can still be made today. Finding ways to make this personal and understandable is vital while there’s still a possibility of doing something. Amali Tower’s talk brought home the real human consequences in the Global South of the rich world’s policies.

You also moderated a panel titled “Beyond Art: Artists Making Movies,” with Makayla Bailey, Aria Dean, Catharine Czudej, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Andrew Norman Wilson. What was your experience of that? 

As the art industry in the US becomes both more conservative and unaffordable because of the cost of living and renting studios in cities like New York and LA, it makes sense that artists who aren’t interested in making paintings will try to take their ideas and ambition elsewhere. For a lot of American artists working with video, the art world feels increasingly untenable.

In his catalogue essay, Christopher Y. Lew mentions you having referred to the sculptures in your Blue Collars series—3D prints of parts of various workers’ bodies—as “solid videos,” and in a recent Instagram post you emphasized the importance of the video work in the show. Is the role that video plays in your practice in any way different than it was at the start? What kind of role might it play in what comes next? 

Everything I do comes out of working with and thinking about the moving image. I went to film school, not art school. Those works made with photogrammetry—photographic 3D scanning—go through a post-production process in the computer that amounts to sculpting in real-time video space. It makes sense to me to think about those sculptures as a kind of solidified video. There aren’t hard boundaries for me between the sculptures, videos, and installations that I make—or between media in general.

Over the last few years, narrative and storytelling have been creeping into my video work. Originally, as part of my Personal Responsibility installation, I planned to make a long narrative film that was going to be split up between the tent sculptures. As I worked on the screenplay during the pandemic, I realized that my story couldn’t be broken up or experienced in a non-linear way, and I made fictional interviews with future climate refugees instead. I’m hoping to shoot that other script in the next couple years as a feature-length film.

Your new Personal Responsibility works—sculptural installations set in the aftermath of imaginary climate disasters, with videos of people recounting tales of horror and forced migration—have been disturbingly on-point in recent weeks, with ongoing fires, flooding, and so forth. How has it been for you to see reality match your imaginings of such catastrophes in real time? 

The Personal Responsibility works are all based on extensive research into firsthand accounts from survivors of climate disasters in the US over the last two decades, most especially hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, and the California wildfires. Sandy was a very personal wake-up call for me. Seeing the lights go out in Lower Manhattan for two weeks in 2012—in supposedly the richest, most-powerful nation on Earth—revealed just how fragile our society is. The pandemic was another, much larger, lesson in disruption. I’ve come to see Covid as a dry run for the kind of disruption and dislocation we will experience as the climate crisis accelerates. Intellectually I know things are going to get really strange, but I was still totally shocked when the sky over New York turned yellow in June.

Has anything about your experience of this exhibition changed or otherwise figured in the way you now think about making new work in the future? Have your priorities evolved? Are there any new kinds of questions you might like to ask and answer? 

I’m approaching a turning point in the cycle of installations about the 21st century that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years. I’ll complete the cycle’s fourth chapter—my project about the Climate Crisis—for a solo exhibition at MOCA in LA in June 2024. After that, when the space and funding is available, I’ll move on to the final two chapters that I have planned, which are utopian. As important as it is to understand how bad things could get, it’s also important to make images of a future that people want to live in—to have something to work towards beyond mitigation and austerity, even in the context of climate catastrophe.

Fox has also created a series of monumental public artworks in Australia with the most-advanced laser technology currently available, including Sunsuper Night Sky in Brisbane (2020), Beacon in Hobart (2022), and Monochord in Melbourne (2022). During a discussion with Art in America, Fox talked about his work in different mediums on different scales and the ways his synesthetic visions have come to life.

How would you characterize TRIPTYCH and how it fits into your work?

It’s the latest installment of audiovisual pieces that I’ve been making for almost 20 years. The first installment was work for an oscilloscope, audio-visual films that were my first attempt to create a sort of mechanical synesthesia, with synchronicity between audible and visible voltage. I was obsessed with that and toured around the world, carrying an oscilloscope with me around to noise and punk venues all over. I could make beautiful images on the oscilloscope that were crystalline and clear, but back then I had a Sony Handycam that was running into a shitty projector and then projected onto a sheet in a punk squat somewhere. I became increasingly frustrated with the sound-to-image results.

Then I saw a laser in real life for the first time. I’d never been to raves or clubs in my youth. I wasn’t involved in club culture at all. But when I was playing a show in Melbourne, I walked in and there was a green laser in the corner that had been left on, shooting smiley faces and unicorns in sync with the house music that was playing in the background. I saw that and had a weird epiphany. It was a green laser, and my oscilloscope works were green. A lot of my early work being green is not a conscious choice or an aesthetic decision. It was technically determined. The oscilloscope works were green because oscilloscopes are green. It takes less energy to make a bright green light then it takes to make any other color, because our eyes are ultra-receptive to green light. That’s why technical equipment, like old monochromatic computer screens, are green. We’re geared for green, and that has to do with discerning predators in foliage. We have a much greater level of detail with our green vision.

Anyway, when I was working with mechanical synesthesia, it was never the most common form of synesthesia, which is sound to color. Instead, I was working with shape and movement. I was working with the dynamism of a sound wave and what I discovered to be the inherent geometry nested in a sound. I was able to tease that out visually.

Is that term “mechanical synesthesia” yours?

As far as I know. Somebody else might have used it before, but what it describes for me is the feeling that I had the first time I saw a sound and an image connect in that geometric way. Not all of them did when I first plugged noise into an oscilloscope and started looking at it. A lot of it was rubbish—a lot of it was messy and wasn’t very interesting. And then there was this crystalline second or so where the wave form rectified. The wave form distorted and clipped, and when it clipped, it created corners in the image. I felt like I experienced synesthesia for the first time: I was listening to something and seeing the same phenomenon, literally—not an aestheticized or mediated representation of the sound but an actual physical manifestation of what I was hearing. The two things connected in a neurological way that felt to me like what a synesthetic experience would feel like. I felt like I’d found a way to manufacture it.

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Can you explain the way in which the sounds you create and the light you’re projecting are one in the same?

Well, they’re connected. I’ve called it signal simultaneity. The way I used to work is that I would take the voltage that is required to make a sound come out of a speaker, which is a waveform in a kind of Platonic or abstracted sense. It’s the voltage that moves speakers backward and forward. I take that voltage and apply it to two mirrors that are spinning inside a laser projector. There’s an X axis and a Y axis—they’re the things that displace a single laser beam to create a show. If you’re driving the X and Y mirrors with the left and right voltage of a stereo signal, you’re essentially looking at the voltage that you’re hearing.

So, if soundless, a laser beam would project in one direction, but you introduce waves that displace it?

It’s the way that old CRT [cathode ray tube] televisions with big tubes worked. They had three RGB color guns at the back. Voltage would be sent to those and they would scan using electromagnets on either side. The voltage would pull things from side to side, up and down, and create images through the persistence of vision phenomena. The reason I can draw what seems to be a solid three-dimensional cone of light with a single laser beam is that I’m displacing it so fast that your eyes perceive it as a solid. It’s like when you get a sparkler and spin it around, it looks like a solid circle. Picasso did a whole series of photos like this, where he lit things up and then these sort of drawings in the air were captured in long-exposure photographs. That phenomenon of persistence of vision means you can create all kinds of images just using voltage.

I was trying to recreate sounds visually, and then I realized I could do that three-dimensionally and essentially have people standing inside a sound, or the realization of a sound. When I saw the possibility of making a three-dimensional version of sound with light, that was extraordinary. I thought, that’s what I want to do!

How does TRIPTYCH relate to Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski?

Stanislaus—in Australia he’s called Stan—was an incredibly prolific artist. From his arrival in Adelaide, in the mid-1950s, he was doing a lot of paintings and a lot of design work. He also did huge murals in the city and sculptures with all kinds of materials. He became quite well known in the visual art world in the latter part of his career for getting involved in computer-generated imagery really early on. When everyone was going crazy for Mandelbrot sets, and computers were starting to draw images, he was there bringing his Op-Art sensibilities into computer-generated imagery.

What’s amazing is that I’d never encountered his incredible body of work before, and I’ve been working in the field for 20 years. It’s just bizarre to me. I’d heard his name in passing when I was working on a commission years ago to build a giant Theremin—a huge interactive instrument that sat in the middle of Melbourne for a while—because he built paneled musical instruments that work like Theremins. But I had no idea he made laser work, and that he was one of the first people to do laser shows.

All artists go through periods of personal epiphanies where they think they’ve discovered something, and very often they haven’t discovered it at all. When I realized that I could do what I was doing with oscilloscopes with lasers, I was discovering a technique that was used by all laser-show makers in the 1960s and ’70s. They would prototype their laser shows on oscilloscopes and then move them across to laser projectors that were much more expensive. So I wasn’t discovering anything new, but for the materiality of what I needed to do, I was discovering it for the first time.

How did you come to start looking into Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work?

I was invited by someone at the State Library of South Australia to go through a collection Ostoja-Kotkowski materials, and that happened to coincide with the establishment of a festival called Illuminate Adelaide. I created a work for that called Library of Light (2021). In a blurb for that I mentioned Ostoja-Kotkowski and a couple weeks later I just got a Google-translated block of text from Przasnysz, Poland, where he had lived, saying, “We can’t believe you’re interested in Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work. Would you come and talk to our historical society about him?”

I booked a ticket and it was a beautiful experience. They were so surprised that I turned up that it was a bit like the Beatles coming to town. They were disproportionately happy that I was there, which was really endearing and lovely. I got a tour of the town and the street named after Ostoja-Kotkowski, and a cultural center that’s being refurbished. Hopefully I’ll go back and perform at the opening.

How sophisticated or not is the laser technology you use for TRIPTYCH?

I’m using standard laser projectors that are built for performing laser displays. That technology has increased remarkably since I started. Like all technology, the price, the size, and everything else gets better and faster and more efficient.

There’s nothing particularly special about them—they’re a known quantity. But the ones I use for the large-scale shows are definitely not. They are industrial cutting lasers that companies won’t really sell for entertainment purposes. All the ones that I know are available have been bought secondhand from solar-panel manufacturing companies that have gone broke and sell off their equipment. People buy them and then repurpose them for making displays, but they’re extremely dangerous, and working at that larger scale is a completely different proposition.

How did the prospect of using that kind of larger-scale laser originate for you?

It happened because of the pandemic, when the world changed quite suddenly and led to a complete wipeout of all work for me and a lot of my colleagues. For the first time in 20 years, I was looking at my studio gear for things to sell. Then the director of the Brisbane Festival, Louise Bezzina, called out of the blue and said, “We’d love to talk to you about coming to Brisbane and doing a citywide installation, something that will be visible from a lot of different places and be quite spectacular.” They didn’t want anyone to gather because of Covid, and they didn’t want anyone to have to be in just one place to see it. It’s an oxymoronic brief in a way: to make a spectacle that doesn’t have a particular place from which to view it.

I tried to back out of it because I had done something similar in Melbourne from a skyscraper, using what were for me then the most powerful lasers I could get my hands on. I used them first in an installation called White Beam for the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania in 2013. That was a commission that I did on a tree-lined boulevard with a 30-watt beam. It kind of worked, but I had open fires creating smoke and misters in the trees with moisture coming from the sky—I made a whole environment there. But when you’re up on a skyscraper there is nothing to articulate the light, so I wasn’t sure if it would work. Everybody wants Tron, with lasers shooting all over the city like some kind of science-fiction film. But in Melbourne it was quite muted. There was a counterintuitive kind of light in the sky. People were thinking, What the hell is that—are we being invaded by aliens? But it was very subtle. It wasn’t spectacular.

I explained this to the Brisbane Festival director and said, “I don’t think I can create what it is that you want.” But the more I tried to back away from it, the more they wanted me to do it. Brisbane normally has a massive fireworks display with rock music called Riverfire. They couldn’t do it during the pandemic, so basically my project happened because they couldn’t do the fireworks. I was saying to the festival director, “People love fireworks, and you’re going to disappoint 4 million people by telling them this is fireworks. I can make something else, but I can’t make fireworks.”

How did the equipment you had access to change?

Two companies contended for the job, and when the second one sent the technical specifications of what they had, I didn’t understand what I was reading. I read the specifications of the laser, and it was kind of impossible. It was very powerful, and very, very tight. There was almost no divergence in the beam, which means you can see it for a really long distance because it doesn’t get wider. In this kind of Shakespearean betrayal, I gave the job—a very big job—to the company I’d never worked with. I didn’t sleep for two weeks while making the decision, but I really wanted to see this thing. I thought I might disappoint 4 million people with this project, which would be disastrous, but I decided to take the risk. And the first time I saw one of these lasers shoot from a rooftop, my jaw dropped. It was stunning. You could see it all across a well-lit city, a beautifully articulated beam. All you had to do was make it move a little bit and it would sweep. It was gorgeous. All of the sudden, everything felt possible.

In what ways are lasers of this kind dangerous? I’ve read their beams can travel as far as 160,000 kilometers?

There are all these metrics when you’re dealing with laser safety, particularly with civil aviation, because laser light, generally, even from a standard show projector, can travel really long distances. The light is well-columnated, and its energy is all in one direction, so it just keeps going. There’s a distance within which you should not hit a human being with a laser in the eye—that’s what they call “ocular hazard distance.” Normally, that’s hundreds of meters with a standard show laser. But with these industrial lasers, the ocular hazard distance is 8 kilometers [nearly 5 miles]—you have to be that far away from this thing for it not to damage your eye immediately. That’s incredibly powerful.

The final gradation in the metrics is called “glare distance,” which basically means that if you were looking in the direction of the laser, you would detect or feel something. You wouldn’t necessarily see it, but you might detect it, and that’s enough for them to be worried about from a civil aviation point of view, for pilots with so many distractions.

When you say you wouldn’t “see” it, what would that mean otherwise?

It’s actually just a bit of math, because it’s so abstract. No one’s ever actually stood 160,000 kilometers away from this thing and gone, “Oh yeah, yeah, I can detect something.” It’s an extrapolation.

What kind of damage would it do to the eye? Would it burn it?

You could write a book on the kind of misinformation and mystery that that surrounds ocular safety with laser displays, even within the industry. There are international standards for what they call “maximum permissible exposure,” the MPE, which is very conservative. I do shows legally within the MPE, and [in club and theater shows] I use all kinds of things like lenses to make the beams wider and take the power down. I like to do the show safely because it is not comfortable or enjoyable if you don’t. The International Laser Display Association, ILDA, would have you believe that you can operate a show at 10 times the MPE and it would be OK. But in their estimation, most laser shows that you experience are about 100 times over the maximum permissible exposure. The thing with laser damage to the eye is that it’s not immediate. Generally, the damage would be minor and subtle, and what would happen is you start getting headaches like five years later when you’re reading. It’s not a burning of the eyeballs, but it’s still something that you don’t want to inflict on people. I recently had to get reading glasses. I went to the optometrist and said, “I’ve been working with lasers for 20 years and I’m worried that I might have damaged myself when I didn’t yet know what I was doing.” But there was nothing wrong with my eyes. What that suggests to me is that the international standards are very conservative. But there is still danger if it’s done badly or incorrectly.

How did the first large-scale work at the Brisbane Festival go?

It worked, but I would never do it the same way again. I had to make that one on Zoom. I did all the site visits on Zoom, and I was using Google Earth because we couldn’t travel in Australia at all while we were in lockdown. I was making the piece in a very abstract way, and I remember arriving in Brisbane the first day just and thinking, Oh my god, it’s so much bigger when you’re standing in it! For that project, I had seven of the big lasers, and they were put on seven different buildings.

How much does one of the big lasers cost?

Between 60,000 and 80,000 euros (around $66,000-$88,000). But by the time you’ve done the work to have the refrigeration system that it needs, put a scan head on it, and all the other things that need to happen to make it safe, you probably get to 100,000 euros ($110,000) per unit. The ones that I had in Brisbane were owned by a consortium of laser companies, and they travel around the world. They were in Dubai, and then in Las Vegas. I managed to get seven of them, and I think there were 12 available in the world.

How does the sound component of your large-scale presentations work?

I had to develop a way to synchronize the soundtrack. The sound was on a web app, and you could walk around and experience the audio with the display. You wouldn’t have to gather around a PA system to do it—it could be delivered to a device. Which is also fiendishly difficult to do, because everyone’s got different devices and different operating systems and different Bluetooth headphones. To try and coordinate that was difficult, but we got that working. It’s a web app, and you just hit play.

Your next big project like this was Beacon in Hobart, Australia, in 2022. The photographs from that look quite dramatic…

What I decided to do with Beacon was gather the lasers in one place from which I distributed all of that power. It created a corridor of intensity. When you were standing underneath the lasers, you could see them shoot out into space, and they were so bright and so articulate and precise. It was quite amazing. At one point, there were these little explosions in the beams, and I asked my laser guy, Arthur Ipsaros of Genius Laser Technology, “What is that?!” He said, “Those are insects dying. It’s a massive bug zapper that you’ve created!”

Anyway, it created an optical illusion with planes of light. They went over the mountain, and it looked like the beams just stopped in midair. I got so many messages from people saying, “How did you make the light stop? That’s impossible!” I was like, “Yeah, it’s not happening—it’s a complete optical illusion.” What was amazing is that when you were standing under the lasers, a beam would sweep from left to right. But when you were at the other end, the beam comes from kilometers away and sweeps right over your head in this beautiful slow arc. It was a completely different experience. Since the beams were directly above you, you could turn around, and it looked like there was another laser the same distance in the other direction shooting back. It almost triangulated, as an optical experience, so much so that I started to think that maybe the world was flat. Not seriously, but the scale of something so big distorts everything. You can’t make sense of it.

Would you make large-scale work of the kind again? Do you have any current plans?

Absolutely. I have pitches around to do various things. I’ve learned a lot every time I’ve done one. I made a joke with a journalist in Hobart who asked, “How do you prepare for something like this?” I said, “Well, I don’t have a Hobart to practice on!” It’s not like I can prototype these. These are works that are happen in my little studio in Melbourne, very much in the abstract. When I arrive on site, I see and hear them really for the first time.

The cast of subjects is widely international, and the roster includes architects at different stages in their careers, including David Adjaye, David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller (of Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Bjarke Ingels, and Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg (of SO – IL), among others.

The new volume follows the 2020 book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, for which Szántó interviewed museum directors in the midst of the pandemic about the state of art institutions going forward.

Below, Szántó spoke with ARTnews about aspirational architecture, museums’ new trend toward humility, and how the art world can help guide society at large.

ARTnews: Before getting to the new book, what was the response like around The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues? Was there anything that surprised you or stood out?

András Szántó: Just the other day I was having dinner with a museum director and he was talking about it. That book came out before the end of 2020, when we were still deeply in the pandemic, and he said, “You know, we were at a moment when we were questioning so much and losing faith, and just the fact that there was a book about the future—with that word in the title—was tremendously reassuring.” That’s been the big surprise: how many people found it somehow reassuring, or optimistic. Which I found very interesting for a book of conversations with museum executives who were, without fail, experiencing the most-difficult, most-trying time of their careers, talking about a cultural/economic landscape that was treacherous and ominous in so many ways. I was very pleased that that it didn’t turn into some sort of bummer.

I think the underlying root of that optimism was [the belief] that the museum can overcome difficult phases, which we can now see happening in light of bounce-backs in terms of audience and funding. And also that the museum, as an institutional typology, can evolve. Contrary to public perception, the museum is not this ossified, high-end elitist institution trapped in a travertine box, a Greek temple that is static and unable to change. It is an institution that is very much capable of evolving and becoming relevant in contemporary society. I have to say that that message wasn’t obvious to me going into the book. I was aware of strains of new thinking about the museum, but it was reassuring to see so much evidence of this new thinking and willingness to the push the museum outside of its old comfort zone into a more contemporary form that is aligned with the needs of today’s society.

AN: What made you turn to architects next?

When I was explaining the first book to people, I found myself saying that it’s almost like there’s new software running the museum. There’s a new set of ambitions animating the museum, and a lot of those ambitions have to do with functions like engaging the community or creating more space for education and entertainment, and new types of art that are not paintings or sculptures, creating community hubs for cities, engaging the natural environment, and things of that nature. It is logical to ask, “What kind of a museum building is going to be a catalyst for all that?” What I found is that architects are not only willing to answer that question but are able to lead museums toward answers. Museum-making is probably the top thing you can do as an architect, and the architects who get to design museums are also engaged in many other spheres: they build universities, factories, governmental facilities, parks, churches. Architects have a broad set of references and are able to bring them into questions of what sorts of forms to give to institutions.

AN: How did you go about putting together the list of which architects you would speak with? It’s a quite diverse group working in different places in different ways.

When I did my first book, because I work in the museum field a lot as a consultant, I knew a majority of the people. For the second book that was not the case. It was important to me to have a global range and gender parity as well. I gradually came to the conclusion, based on a lot of conversations and advice, to use the book primarily as a way to give voice to a younger, incoming generation. Architects don’t mature too young, so the young generation can be people in their 40s and 50s. Would I have liked to have Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano? Absolutely. But I think their voices have been heard, and in many ways they speak through their acolytes. Many names will be new, and I think that provides a service to the field, because these are the people who are in the vanguard and, in some cases, will be building museums for the next 10, 20, 30 years.

AN: How hesitant or eager were architects to speak with you? It’s a very ideas-driven field, but then it’s also very contingent on clients. Architects also operate on such different scales of time, from the idea stage to the execution stage.

For the younger generation, I think it was an opportunity to think out loud about something they really care about. And architects are very collaborative. Another thing I’ll say is that architects are absolutely fascinating interview subjects because they are incredibly good verbal virtuosos. Architects are—forgive the word—seducers: they have to present these incredibly expensive projects to all kinds of stakeholders, and they convince people to do extraordinary, even revolutionary buildings. These are people endowed with a finely tuned capacity to make arguments.

AN: In your introduction to the book, you write, “A museum should never be confused with its building—it is so much more.” What do you mean by that?

You can make a great museum in a mediocre building, but no amount of great architecture will make a good museum out of an institution that doesn’t have a good program or a good collection. We’ve all been to old dusty museums that have the world’s most extraordinary collections, and, by contrast, we’ve been in shiny buildings that are just boring. In this moment, post-Covid and post-starchitecture, this has a more current meaning as well. Since the 1990s, we had a post-Bilbao style, where cities invested enormous amounts of money in extraordinary, flamboyant architecture that in some ways began to dominate museums. The assumption was that these buildings were to serve as magnets for cultural tourism and as emblems for their cities. They were very successful at that, but I think today there’s a kind of disenchantment with that notion of the museum that competes with its own contents, as a sort of giant sculpture in an urban landscape. We are looking at more humble museums that are much more woven into their surroundings and speak a different language.

And then, during the pandemic, we really came to terms with questions like: Who is the museum for? How is the museum an institutional construct, and how should it serve communities and serve society? Service to society involves a range of activities that are not confined to what happens in museum buildings. It’s about pushing beyond and beginning to think of the museum as not just this thing trapped in its own building, but something that is fused with its city through a set of relationships, collaborations, projections beyond the walls.

AN: In the intro, you quote an architect saying, “We can make sure museums are pioneers, part of the avant-garde. Not just the artistic avant-garde, but the social avant-garde.” What constitutes that social avant-garde?

That was Bjarke Ingels who said that. He is as close as it comes to sort of a wunderkind of this younger generation, designed the Googleplex [Google’s tech campus in Silicon Valley, conceived in collaboration with Hearthwick Studios] and Mars Science City [a campus for outer-space simulation outside Dubai]. He’s one of the most successful architects of his generation, and as a Danish architect, he is particularly invested in climate as a subject. He said that in the context of work that they are doing with port cities around the world where they are creating green ports. Ports are so substantial and so important to the economy of their regions that, if they go green, then everybody else is forced to go green.

The conversation we were having was about the impact of the museum. I think what that quote reflects that is that very often we confuse things we do in the very small art world bubble and think that that is driving society forward. But, in fact, a lot of what happens in the art world is fairly insular, speaking to a fairly narrow audience—it’s a bit of a hall of mirrors. I think what Bjarke meant there is that we can really drive society forward by making the museum a platform of public awareness around these issues. And maybe architecture can play a role in that in in terms of how we integrate museums in different scenarios with other configurations of buildings and institutions. Architects are trusted advisers and have their fingers in all these other pies. They can nudge institutions to look beyond their immediate functions serving an art public.

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Brown—whose retrospective closed in San Francisco in March and moved to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it opens May 27—made her name as a budding Bay Area artist whose thick impasto style turned abstraction toward embodiment, sometimes with the air of a wry aside. The earliest works in the SFMOMA show gleamed at the top of layered oil surfaces that suggest a lot of searching underneath (the catalogue describes formative paintings by Brown “so thick they could weigh 100 pounds and take decades to dry”). But as soon as she scaled certain heights that would thrill so many artists making their way, Brown took a bow—and moved on.

Thanksgiving Turkey (1959) is emblematic of her early work for its mix of mystery and a sort of mastery that can be deceiving. The depiction of a carcass hanging in the air nods toward classicism—wall text describing it included an image of Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox as inspiration—but its strange coloring makes it an evocative oddity while its deadpan matter-of-factness makes it somehow funny in a way that’s hard to pin down. The same goes for Green Bowl (1964), an austerely geometric still life that marked an audacious turn for Brown away from early success (Thanksgiving Turkey had already been acquired by MoMA in New York, and she was secure with a dealer with whom she would soon part ways after her stylistic twists left him bemused) toward a more idiosyncratic calling that took its own cues.

“Brown’s aim was not to undermine the art world in a way that was consciously subversive; she simply did not care, and part of what makes her so interesting is this disregard for acceptance,” Nancy Lim writes in the catalogue. (Lim, an associate curator, worked under SFMOMA chief curator Janet Bishop in organizing the show, which after its stop at the Carnegie Museum travels to the Orange County Museum of Art next year.)

Following Brown’s circuitous trains of thought thereafter leads to different way stations and destinations for indelible visions that never stayed fixed for long. Even more indicative of her more mature years than Thanksgiving Turkey and Green Bowl are works like Noel in the Kitchen (1963), an early instance of Brown painting her son with a mix of motherly wonder and fascination with the dreamier dimensions of domesticity. The work tells a heartwarming story, with a bare-bottomed toddler reaching mischievously toward a too-tall counter while a pair of dogs stand sentry. But it also flies off into aesthetic revelry, with a checkered floor that shakes up the pictorial space and a curious patch of wall on the side rendered with enough acuity and care to make it class as a painting in its own right.

Brown painted her family a lot, and with enough earnestness and sincerity to suggest Norman Rockwell as filtered through a sense of post-Beat Generation San Francisco sass. She loved holidays (enough to name her son Noel), and the exhibition took care to pair certain family tableaux with the sepia-toned snapshots that inspired them. Brown became even more interesting, however, when she started painting herself.

Of the many things that figuration in deft-enough hands can do, revealing a sense of both inner and outer selves has to rank near the top. For Brown, the prospects of that compounded when she turned to self-portraiture in which she seems to have painted in service of her own and others’ gazes, all at the same time. A forthright, almost confrontational look projects from many of her paintings of the sort, but the stare-downs seem to have been staged first and foremost between the artist and herself.

Then there are signal-scrambling highlights like Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat (1970) and Woman Wearing Mask (1972), the latter featuring Brown standing, hand-on-hip, in red heels, black lingerie, and a cartoonish plastic cat mask. It’s simultaneously sexy and sexless, and a whole spectrum of degrees between—with the lingering result for a viewer (or some viewers, at least) of having been seen by Brown while in the act of looking at her look at her own figure figuratively rendered.

As later paintings chronicle the years that followed—with age, Brown falls in thrall to swimming the forbidding waters of San Francisco Bay, focuses on the joys of dancing with one of the four husbands she courted, and ventures into realms of New Age spirituality that surrounded her at the end of her life, when she died in an accident at the age of 52 while installing an obelisk in the ashram of her guru in India—the exhibition offered an unusually intimate vision of Brown, as an artist but also as a person who lived and loved and painted in a way that suggests a private practice would have suited her just fine.

If that reaction is right, consider it a testament to Brown’s approach to the art she made and art as a whole. If it’s not, more power to her.

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The book part of A View of a Landscape includes essays by writers including Fred Moten, Adrienne Edwards, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Thomas Lax (as well as this author, who first wrote about Beasley in 2015). The sound part of the project includes new recordings created by L’Rain, Moor Mother, Jlin, Jason Moran, and more. To all involved, Beasley granted access to an extensive image bank featuring photographs, videos, and other materials related to his work, with an invitation to draw on them however much or little made sense.

In advance of a release-related event at Performance Space in New York on March 23, Beasley spoke with Art in America about mixing mediums, abstaining from authorship, and finding new forms for work that looks backward and forward at once.

What was the genesis for the new book and LP set? When did you start thinking about adding that to the body of work it surveys?

Around 2017 I applied for a grant for a sort of eight-part project that would incorporate a soundproof chamber with a motor running, a listening room, and sculptures, and then some photographs and a publication that would possibly have a record and some writing in it. The publication was something I conceived as another channel for the work and a way to put out images and ideas I’d been trying to reconcile. This predated the idea for the Whitney show, so it was originally intended as an independent project that could work alongside the other works but channeled through a different medium.

What was the original conception for the “View of a Landscape” group of works as a whole?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the South and a kind of material presence of that channels through it, but not so plainly or very clearly. For me, in the studio, there’s always residue that drives my aesthetic choices. And then there’s this push to understand what a site or specific geography does to the way we process things like music or politics or experience. When I would travel from Virginia to New York, the way I would carry myself in different contexts was very actively different. I remember my mom being really specific about garments and clothes that I could or couldn’t wear. Those little details of geography and the way we navigate and move are really particular, and I want to try to in some way make sense of what that is and how we apply it to broader landscapes [and narrower ones], like how we view the relationship between the South and the Deep South.

There are things I’m trying to uncover in the work and in conversations with people who are also trying to uncover them. In a lot of ways, the publication tracks how I’ve moved throughout the United States. I haven’t lived in so many different places, but there are enough touchpoints to sort of graph what experiences of moving are for Black folks in America. For me, that was being in Virginia, and then in Detroit, and then New Haven. All of these places have some kind of fraught relationship, either with intense conservatism that makes it difficult for Black folks to navigate these spaces equitably, or just systemic racism that is manufactured very deeply. The image bank that I provided everyone with had traces of these things, but then seeing how people put things together was really interesting.

How did your idea for the image bank arise?

It’s strange because, even though the publication was an idea that I imagined would represent my work and be an actual object or thing I made, there was a kind of release of authorship. I gave almost 20 people the keys to do what they will and to bring their thoughts and considerations into the fold, and then I assembled that. It allowed me to continue a more collaborative—dare I say curatorial—direction to things that I’m processing. I said, “Here are some images and some stuff I’m thinking about. They may seem very vague, but what is your response? How do you process this?”

There were maybe 1,000 images: images that I’d taken off my family’s property and some videos, but also images of artworks and examples of projects of mine from over the years. It was like a dossier that I could hand to someone to show what I’ve been up to. It was organized by subject matter, but I didn’t provide descriptions for how to use any of it. It was more like, “Here’s some stuff I would like for you to see. Make time to go through and process what it is, and if you have questions, we can talk.” I feel like every artist has a cache of photographs and references and things they’ve collected throughout the years, and it’s just a matter of in what context they share them. I’ve had videos that I only share during a studio visit—I wouldn’t put them in an exhibition. Some things are reserved, and the image bank had items that were of that nature. But after giving them up and releasing them to people who would enter them with a certain amount of consideration and care, I felt like if somebody could justify pulling an image and using it, then that was enough for me to let go of what that thing is and let it live.

Did you have artists books or publications in mind as a model, however directly or indirectly?

We all have box-set LPs that have liner notes, but those are a different form because they don’t necessarily have extensive catalogues showing other aspects of someone’s practice. I really wanted essays for this as well, and it felt like a space to put all of this stuff into. To me it was important for it to exist in this box-set form, with a record in a slipcase in a tight container alongside a book, so that those things could exist on a shelf together.

What sort of prompts did you give to the musicians involved?  

I obviously had ideas around what everyone would contribute, but I think I did a decent job of refusing to guide them. I provided all of them with a set of stems—24 tracks from the recording of the motor—and the only stipulation was that they had to use those as a sort of starting point. But they could do anything they wanted with them. I’ve had some kind of relationship or some sort of proximity with all of them. They were all aware of the of the work already, so they weren’t coming in completely cold. But when I got each track back, I had no idea what they would be.

Were you surprised by any of the contributions, or were any of a kind that was unexpected?

There were quite a few. It’s less surprising in retrospect, because he’s been engaging in performance as of late, but when Fred Moten delivered his essay, he also sent me an audio recording of him reading it. It’s altered a little bit from the text, but I felt like he was wanting to bridge both [parts of the project, the book and the LPs]. I used his recording in one of the musical tracks, and he was happy about it. Some of the essays responded to my work, but also to certain aspects of my life and my family’s life as well. I didn’t really have a lot of expectations, but I was really surprised by how strong those things were. I realized I’ve known everyone involved for a long time, and all these things came from conversations that were natural and didn’t feel forced, all from relationships that have been built over a long period of time. It’s powerful to realize that all of these people have experienced the work in person and have been able to account for that through language in a real palpable way. Having people write about you is weird. It’s a strange experience.

What do you feel like the publication adds to the “A view of a landscape” project overall?

It’s very simple: it adds an object in lots of people’s homes. The attention we paid to it as a physical object was important to me, so that when people get it, they can handle the cotton paper, the plastic surfaces, the different kinds of textures and layering. It’s the first time I’ve been able to have so much input into a widely distributed object. And conceptually, materially, it’s interesting because it’s not so common to get a book wrapped in corrugated plastic.

What is the status of the cotton-gin motor now?

It’s in storage. We’re waiting for its next destination. There are some things being worked on to realize it again. We’ll see what happens…

Adriano Pedrosa has been artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) since 2014, having started after cocurating the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. At MASP, Pedrosa—who was also recently named curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale—has overseen a series of “Histories” exhibitions that began in 2016 with “Histories of Childhood,” followed the next year by “Histories of Sexuality.” His venerated 2018 “Afro-Atlantic Histories” has traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Its next stop is the Dallas Museum of Art.) In October, MASP will mount “Indigenous Histories,” an international survey organized in collaboration with the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, Norway. 

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As told to A.i.A. We are definitely returning to a sense of normality, little by little. In the past year we had some concerns about audience and attendance, and therefore about budgets as well. But we’re slowly getting back. Our “Brazilian Histories” exhibition was quite successful and drew a lot of visitors. We always try to acquire works from our “Histories” exhibitions—it’s the main channel of acquisitions, mostly through gifts from supporters of the museum. We had about 400 works in the exhibition, and we are in the process of acquiring some 45 of them. 

For us, 2023 will be a very special year dedicated to the exhibition “Indigenous Histories.” It has been six years in the planning. “Brazilian Histories” was, of course, focused on Brazilian art and artists; with Covid, that was a way for us to be cautious in terms of loans from abroad and financing. But we are finally getting back to international programming with an exhibition about Indigenous culture, in Brazil but also everywhere [around] the globe. People in the art world are paying attention to that now. 

There’s been a big shift since the late ’80s, when every exhibition in the US and Europe was, basically, European and North American artists. At the end of the ’80s, you started to see exhibitions of Latin American art on the international scene. And then, in the ’90s, that activity increased and became almost a norm. You can’t talk about contemporary art now without including artists from all over the world. Latin America tends to lead the way, but the trend has expanded to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. You see exhibitions organized by curators from these regions all over now. 

I think the last chapter of this will be paying serious attention to institutions and museums outside Europe and America. In the last few years, people have started to take note of what museums in the Global South are doing, and those museums are organizing more ambitious exhibitions in their own right. It’s part of a continuum.

Banner images above, from left to right: Denilson Baniwa, Dead nature 1, 2016 [Courtesy the Artist]; Duhigó, Monkey Hammock, 2019 [Courtesy the Artist]; Adriano Pedrosa [illustration by Denise Nestor]; view of “Brazilian Histories” [photo by Isabella Matheus]; MASP [photo by Eduardo Ortega]

Pedrosa has been artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) since 2014, having started after cocurating the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. At MASP, Pedrosa has overseen a series of “Histories” exhibitions that began in 2016 with “Histories of Childhood,” followed the next year by “Histories of Sexuality.” His venerated 2018 “Afro-Atlantic Histories” has traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Its next stop is the Dallas Museum of Art.) In October, MASP will mount “Indigenous Histories,” an international survey organized in collaboration with the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, Norway. —Andy Battaglia

We are definitely returning to a sense of normality, little by little. In the past year we had some concerns about audience and attendance, and therefore about budgets as well. But we’re slowly getting back. Our “Brazilian Histories” exhibition was quite successful and drew a lot of visitors. We always try to acquire works from our “Histories” exhibitions—it’s the main channel of acquisitions, mostly through gifts from supporters of the museum. We had about 400 works in the exhibition, and we are in the process of acquiring some 45 of them. 

For us, 2023 will be a very special year dedicated to the exhibition “Indigenous Histories.” It has been six years in the planning. “Brazilian Histories” was, of course, focused on Brazilian art and artists; with Covid, that was a way for us to be cautious in terms of loans from abroad and financing. But we are finally getting back to international programming with an exhibition about Indigenous culture, in Brazil but also everywhere [around] the globe. People in the art world are paying attention to that now. 

There’s been a big shift since the late ’80s, when every exhibition in the US and Europe was, basically, European and North American artists. At the end of the ’80s, you started to see exhibitions of Latin American art on the international scene. And then, in the ’90s, that activity increased and became almost a norm. You can’t talk about contemporary art now without including artists from all over the world. Latin America tends to lead the way, but the trend has expanded to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. You see exhibitions organized by curators from these regions all over now. 

I think the last chapter of this will be paying serious attention to institutions and museums outside Europe and America. In the last few years, people have started to take note of what museums in the Global South are doing, and those museums are organizing more ambitious exhibitions in their own right. It’s part of a continuum.

This is a newish mode of work for you. How did you get started on it?

It started during lockdown, when I was revisiting older shoots because I couldn’t see anyone. I wanted to work against the idea of editing a shoot down to one photo, to the decisive moment. Because of the way I shoot, I always felt there was a limitation to that that could be frustrating. I follow the people I shoot, and there’s an exchange—it’s not like trying to grab the essence of someone, or controlling someone. I always wanted to find a way to use multiple images, so I started experimenting when I was in lockdown in Athens, Georgia. Then I started shooting this series properly when I went back to Berlin. Since it was Covid time, it felt very different sharing space with people. In the past I had been shooting people in my studio and erasing the background. But I wanted to do the opposite by going into other people’s spaces. There was a real charge to that.

What does the process for assembling these images entail?

I still shoot analogue, with an old Hasselblad from the ’60s, so I started to work with a process of compressing a roll of film all into one. There are 12 images [in each photo print], but some of them I make so transparent that they’re barely visible. Usually there are between five and nine images that are really noticeable.

How do you then superimpose them? Do you do that on a computer?

Yes. I scan the negatives, and then I stratify and layer them in the same sequence as they were shot. From there I play with the transparency of each, because not all 12 images in a roll are going to be great. Some are just barely visible, or completely transparent. They’re each really completely different. I thought there was going be a system when I first started, but then I realized that every image is completely different.

So there’s a lot of postproduction.

There is, but not in the single images themselves. Every image in a roll of film is treated honestly as a single image, but then they get compiled. I showed some of the first series of these works with Tif Sigrids in Athens in February [in an exhibition titled “In Flux”]. I was trying to stay with a somewhat realistic palette, to keep a kind of neutrality. But then I stopped fighting the fact that the images can change really fast. I didn’t try to compensate, to go against or nullify the process, because certain colors become really strong once you layer them. Layers of blue become more blue. They take on this real intensity. For this show, I just went with it.

It seems like there are some deep wormholes to go down…

I do a lot of them at once. For some, there’ll be like 20 versions. I’ll work on the color on each single one, then they get compiled and I work on the transparency for each. And then once that all comes together, I work on the images and the density and the color again. It’s kind of endless, because you have to make 12 perfect photographs before you even start playing with them.

You mentioned that, before, you more often shot in a studio and then erased backgrounds. What made you want to change from that?

The challenge of it. I shoot on film so it’s limited in terms of the light and everything. I wanted to have to respond to uncontrolled environments. Before, I was abstracting people from their environments to show figures out of context. You would just see the person. But during the pandemic, the idea of home and a sense of place took on a different gravity.

These really seem to ripple and move when you get up close. It’s hard to keep a sense of balance while looking.

There’s a dynamism to the images because the eye is going to try to catch different views. We are trained to recognize faces, so when different ones come at the same time, you see so much more. It’s like things come forward and recede as you travel through. Some of them are kind of lenticular-ish. They’re definitely not fixed.

How did you come up with the title of the show, “What If I Kept Looking”?

I came up with a lot of titles that were a little too analytical or too straightforward. I was trying to find a way to express the idea of duration, of looking not at a single moment but more at the fluidity of longer exposure. My friend Nick Theobald [a painter and sculptor] said it’s kind of like looking at water while being slightly stoned, when things come forward in a succession of moments that come and go. It’s a different experience of time, moving from sequential stop-motion frames and combining them to recreate movement in images. I’m really enjoying it, and I think there’s more to do with this process.