transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Ben, here. This is a re-air of a favorite recent episode, my interview with the painter, Taina H. Cruz. First came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and now the second major contemporary art survey where curators are highlighting Cruz, creator of New York, has just opened at MoMA PS1. If you're looking to get a sense of how emerging artists are thinking about all the many pressures on them now, I think our conversation is worth a listen.

Speaker 2:
[00:39] I want that experience endlessly the whole time you're looking at my work. So, duration matters in that way of how can I really capture and freeze the person in that time and sit with the moods that may come up.

Speaker 1:
[00:58] I'm Ben Davis and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News. The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum's big curated show, which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels next month, MoMA PS1 is staging Greater New York. That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taina H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both of these shows at once. For The Whitney, she is even in a way the face of the show. A work by Cruz, a green, tinged close-up painting of a grinning child called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young, born in 1998 and just getting her MFA from Yale's famous School of Painting last year. She's worked in a variety of media but is known now for paintings, often featuring images of black female figures with a woozy, moody, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes she works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes she's played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors in New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, I wanted to get a sense of the influences from art and otherwise that are shaping her approach to art and what she makes of all the attention. Taina, thank you for talking to me.

Speaker 2:
[02:48] Yes. I'm so happy to be here.

Speaker 1:
[02:50] Where are you right now?

Speaker 2:
[02:51] I am currently in New Haven, Connecticut.

Speaker 1:
[02:54] I wanted to talk to you, pick your brains, partly because I was going through the lists for the Whitney and Greater New York, and your name comes up in both. How does that happen?

Speaker 2:
[03:07] Yeah, it feels really surreal that it happened simultaneously at the same time. I grew up with thinking the city as my playground, so to be included into these institutional big art spaces is very significant and intimate in its own way. It definitely wasn't something that I was strategizing towards or was thinking about. I had just finished grad school and the work was expanding in scale and atmosphere, and just about how much space that I was taking up. So the work was already calling for a different kind of visibility and it just so happened that timing and inlining worked out.

Speaker 1:
[03:47] Do the curators know about each other or they're keeping it a secret from them?

Speaker 2:
[03:52] Now that the announcements of the artist lists were posted, everyone just knows and has been talking. But when I first got the information over the summer fall area, I definitely was able to keep the information to myself.

Speaker 1:
[04:09] Oh, yeah?

Speaker 2:
[04:10] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[04:12] Do you know what's going to be in both of the shows? I mean, can you give people who haven't or aren't going to be able to see the shows a hint of what you're showing?

Speaker 2:
[04:19] Yeah. So for The Whitney, I am presenting a multi-part installation that has a site-specific wall drawing, paintings, an animation that I made, a bronze figurine on top of a stack of drawings and writings I made in the studio. So there's a sense of storytelling and narrative particularly involved for that space. I was given this large curved wall and architecturally created something different than however type of ways that I've been displaying my work. So I was really challenged with this architectural curved wall, and the work was responding to that.

Speaker 1:
[05:02] They threw you a curve ball or a curve wall.

Speaker 2:
[05:04] It definitely did, but I love a good challenge. I was already thinking about curved portals in general. So it just seemed like everything that has happened so far, it just keeps working organically and naturally. So I was already thinking about a curved just exterior in general. So now to show work on that makes so much sense.

Speaker 1:
[05:24] Is that a development in what you've been doing? This multi-layered mixed media installation, scaling up, you're saying?

Speaker 2:
[05:31] Yeah. It even goes back to in grad school for my thesis, the first time I made a painting that looks like it was coming out towards you. So it was definitely a mixture of my sculpture background. I studied sculpture in undergrad. So I am constantly thinking about my work within a 3D space, how art can feel embodied sincerely, and I want my paintings to feel that same way. For my thesis, particularly for that installation, it was more so like how can I create a painting that you can feel like you can delve into, and what better way to do that than to have a painting coming out towards you. So that caused for a different way of showcasing my paintings, and I was still thinking about that for the Whitney installation specifically, different ways of just showing painting.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] Greater New York, is that still top secret?

Speaker 2:
[06:26] No, not top secret. For the Greater New York, my space is in a corner, and I'm going to be doing a large scale wall drawing within that corner. This one feels a lot more atmospheric, but a lot more architectural to the building of MoMA PS1 itself. So there is some specificity towards that as well. It's more so like how can I make the image wrap around you? It's exciting because both of these shows are happening simultaneously and they feel so related, but also is behaving very differently. One is gathering elements to create a stage, a performance, a story, while the other one is more so dispersing into space and working across what keeps lingering. It just depends on where the art is living at the moment.

Speaker 1:
[07:13] But it's interesting to me, in both cases, it sounds like the curators more picked you than works of art. They're actually inviting you to respond to the space in both cases.

Speaker 2:
[07:23] I really like that you mentioned that because outside of me and the work itself, I think they're giving me these opportunities for me to just control or just half full on manipulation of the space given to me. Manipulation may not be the right word, but I have to submit proposals and project ideas. It's not really work that I've made in the past. It's all what is currently I'm feeling and inhabiting at the current moment. They're totally willing for me to let my ideas just splurge all over the space. That's essentially me as an artist. I think it's necessary for me to constantly create something that feels now and present. I'm grateful that it's not like work I've made in the past and it's just done in that, it's something that is actively moving and feels energetically towards something.

Speaker 1:
[08:13] Well, let's talk about you. Maybe that'll give people a sense of the content of some of this new work. So you already said you're from New York originally. Tell me about your background.

Speaker 2:
[08:23] Yeah, I grew up between Harlem and the Bronx. My mom lives in Morningside Heights near Columbia, and my dad is in the Bronx near the Bronx Zoo. He was born in El Barrio in Spanish Harlem, so New York really runs deep in my family through different generations and cultures. I went to school on the Upper West Side and school in Brooklyn Heights, and a lot of my after-school activities really took me all over the city. So again, I think about the city as this playground of discovery. I was in different neighborhoods. I was uptown, downtown, and I was constantly thinking about the movement between these different communities and the energies that was felt, because each block holds something so different. I was just, I was feeling all of that from child to when I went to college. And so I think like I'm still reliving those memories. I'm still feeling how sensorial and heightened that experience was. And I think the work is inspired by that.

Speaker 1:
[09:23] You mentioned in an interview I read with you, the punk goth scene as an influence.

Speaker 2:
[09:29] Yeah, I feel like the punkish scene was also at a time where the Internet was also creating spaces for communities. So I found that there was community reflected on the Internet, but then people were finding inspiration in the communities in New York. I was witnessing this overlap of Internet culture influencing also New York being two steps ahead of like, what is the next trend or something in that way. New York is very gothic. It's very like solitude.

Speaker 1:
[10:01] Gotham City.

Speaker 2:
[10:01] Yeah. I think that is just part of me to really admire the nitty-grittiness of the essence of what it means to be punk rock.

Speaker 1:
[10:10] What was the first thing that inspired you to think about being an artist?

Speaker 2:
[10:15] It's hard to name a first moment because I feel like every little strand was braided from childhood up. I had a very active imagination. I was always playing pretend, inventing worlds, speaking to the stuffed animals. I felt really embodied by my imagination. It felt more like it was in my body and not just something outside of me. But then more literal, my mom gave me a portable dryer race board, something that I would use all the time on subways or on the bus. Going back into the city, I see how much children need stimulation while they're in these public spaces because in these public spaces, there's people themselves going to and from work, dealing with so much. My mom was carrying myself and my younger sister around the city along with her to run errands, and she gave me a dryer race board, and that was my way of finding peace and sanctuary between me feeling the energies of all these other adults. I recognize that as an early memory of when I found art making to be a source of like, okay, this is peace, this is sanctuary, this is my survival of how I can navigate this bustling world.

Speaker 1:
[11:33] It's interesting, working in public as you are doing now, site responsive and in a way mobile. You went to art school though, you went to MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art and studied sculpture, you said?

Speaker 2:
[11:46] Yes. I think that was really like a transformative experience studying sculpture. It combined my interest in the digital and Internet art within something that felt installation-wise, creating environments. So that was really a transformative experience, recognize the type of art that I wanted to make. I did not always feel like I was so tied down to being labeled as a sculptor or a painter or an illustrator. It was just like within the sculpture department, you were given a lot of concepts and theories to help you amplify what you're searching for. I think the sculpture department really allowed that to really flourish.

Speaker 1:
[12:26] Were you a pandemic era student?

Speaker 2:
[12:28] I graduated in 2020, so when it was kicking off.

Speaker 1:
[12:32] You graduated into the pandemic.

Speaker 2:
[12:34] Yeah, so that was super strange. So my last semester of undergrad was online and didn't shift anything. I don't know. I think, if anything-

Speaker 1:
[12:45] How do you show your art to your peers in that situation? How did you?

Speaker 2:
[12:48] Well, I was really working a lot with creating 3D modeling videos and 3D animation. So I was a perfect opportunity to just keep making video work. Even before the pandemic happened, I think when I was studying sculpture, video and installation was front and center of the work that I was interested in. So now that I have everyone's full divided attention on Zoom, everyone was able to see my videos and have to feel something from the videos themselves. That was the work that I was doing. But also, I think I was also interested in creating video games a lot more. I have a lot of extensive background with just playing with technology. So it just allowed me to make video games related to my videos. It was all just different ways of exploring.

Speaker 1:
[13:36] But then you went on to go to the Yale Painting and Printmaking Department, which is a very famous department. A lot of very famous artists have come out of it, Dukende Wiley and John Curran and Mickalene Thomas. You have a multimedia background but decided to go in for painting. Why?

Speaker 2:
[13:53] When I was applying to grad school, I had a studio in Chicago and I was just making a lot of paintings. Painting is something that feels natural to me as well as my video and sculpture work. That's where I feel like I don't have a hierarchy on what matters most to me, which medium matters most to me, and that's why right now, I need to combine them all both if it's necessary. But when I was applying to grad school, I was making a lot of paintings because I think painting is fun, and my portfolio had a lot more of the 2D drawings and paintings than my sculpture. So it was simply like, this is the one moment I'm going to apply to grad school. Let me take what I have, and it just fit the painting category.

Speaker 1:
[14:36] I'm interested in what the mood is in art school right now. You're talking about how you have a background in multimedia stuff, doing video games and stuff. I feel like a lot of image makers are really freaked out because of all the AI stuff and the way the digital world is. Is that a conversation that you're having in school that people are talking about in relationship to painting?

Speaker 2:
[14:59] In a sense, I think the relationship that people are talking about painting, at least what I saw was like, are you abstract or are you figurative?

Speaker 1:
[15:10] Really? Old school. The answer is no. They're not having a conversation. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[15:16] I think that wasn't really the forefront, and so I think I strategize my two years of grad school as like, okay, this is a container. During these two years, I'm just going to figure out what type of artist I want to be or that I already am, and of course, that is always going to be fluctuating. But I was able to really garner those two years as like, I don't have to put my survival on the line and that I had this freedom to experiment, to play with scale, to play with tone, to play with if I want to include a figure or an animal. So I guess like within that discussion, the idea of the digital was backend to me. I can go on forever about the Internet and the digital sphere and what that means to me, but I was more interested in what my paintings were already doing for people and how I can really push them into thinking about it completely differently. That's two years of studio space where I was just having fun and experimenting, I think really solidified what time and pressure means to my work and what that means to others.

Speaker 1:
[16:18] What sort of artists do you look to historically? Or contemporary peers you think are doing relevant work?

Speaker 2:
[16:24] An artist that I look to historically always, I would say Francisco Goya. I think there's a type of existential loneliness that doesn't feel performative, it's atmospheric. The feeling really sits in the space rather than being announced, and I think about that a lot. How tone can carry something heavier than narrative.

Speaker 1:
[16:47] Something I think about Goya is something I can see in your paintings, that he's an old master, but there's something always a little odd in his figuration.

Speaker 2:
[16:55] Yeah, so odd, and I love that it's odd because it just shows that it's more real. I don't know, it really sits with me, it sits with me for a very, very long time, and I think he's that one artist that I'm always finding something new towards. For the contemporary, I would say I look towards modding communities, people who are taking apart devices and putting them back together. Yeah, I think because I'm already coming from this background of art making as embodied, that I look towards other references of embodiment, and I think the modding community, the hackers that are still striving along, really solidifies that these systems aren't fixed, and so I really admire just going back and forth.

Speaker 1:
[17:41] Physically hacking together machines.

Speaker 2:
[17:43] Yeah, physically.

Speaker 1:
[17:44] Like a maker community.

Speaker 2:
[17:45] Yeah, maker community, but also different scripts online, that could easily be, not easily, but now that is, again, with the Internet things have been constantly changing. But I feel like there is an essence of going against this fixed idea of how we can use the Internet and these devices, and they're still holding strong to a lot of what is being able to change today. So I really like to be reminded that there's other communities outside of this art world that is actively building apart, building something together and seeing what comes of it. I think that's where discovery as artists is really important to keep that mainframe alive.

Speaker 1:
[18:25] Yeah, pre-Yale, you made some digital work. You have the work that is a digital avatar of Halle Berry, I think, walks you through a breathing exercise. It's creepy, sincere. What were you trying to get out with that?

Speaker 2:
[18:41] I made that during undergrad. Undergrad, I was really like, let me combine my love of computer science and the tech world and the Glitch Art, digital art community into something that could feel like I could project that.

Speaker 1:
[18:55] Hacked together, hacking together.

Speaker 2:
[18:57] Absolutely. I was interested in spirituality always. My mom was a trained hypnotist and was a very religious person. I'm coming at these worlds, I would call them from a deeply religious perspective, a folklore perspective, but then also computer science, lego robotics, kinetic machinery, putting motors and machines together to create a sort of animated being and all of that sometimes works well in the language of video. I was inspired to just create a 3D avatar of Halle Berry enacting this influencer trope of, can you achieve spirituality through a YouTube video? It's fun to create something that is direct and straight to the point, that doesn't always have to be blurred or layered or a little bit more advanced to get to a reaching point. I felt like sometimes the video is doing what it's doing and we can leave it at that.

Speaker 1:
[20:15] Your art now, even though it's not necessarily working with digital stuff, has been shown in the context of digital stuff, like at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, in the code switch, distributing blackness, reprogramming internet art show. They're showing your paintings in the context of a show about black artists relating to data and art. How do those pieces fit together?

Speaker 2:
[20:42] I think it fits together because I think it fits together.

Speaker 1:
[20:47] Sure, sure, sure. But as opposed for the curator.

Speaker 2:
[20:51] I think particularly for that, it was wonderful.

Speaker 1:
[20:53] You managed to convince someone, I guess is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2:
[20:57] Well, it's also like those paintings were also a collaboration between the curator, Legacy. So Legacy Russell, I really enjoyed when I'm showing in these spaces that there is some connection beyond myself, the art. What else can we pull from there? So having a coffee time with Legacy and we're discussing where she's coming from and where I'm coming from. It just ended up having it being the right moment to create a painting, to really talk about this moment.

Speaker 1:
[21:27] That makes a lot of sense because Legacy Russell wrote Glitch Feminism. She's also from New York and she talks in that book exactly like you do about discovering the Internet in a time in New York when it becomes a place where you're finding subculture in the city is changing. So there's a horror vibe. I mean, you talked about folklore and spirituality. I wouldn't say that the paintings read as digital, but they read as images you're finding and processing, maybe out of digital archives perhaps, and then transforming. Is that how you work more or less?

Speaker 2:
[22:01] Not anymore. So again, that was pre-grad school, pre-right off the bat from pandemic vibes and still in pandemic vibes. That was a source of processing for me.

Speaker 1:
[22:16] You mean because everybody was online. It's the only reference you could have?

Speaker 2:
[22:20] I was always already online. If there was a pandemic or not, I was online. I grew up online. For me, it was more so, again, I was going back into drawing and painting, and I found different images that I was still interested in from a teenager. I would just think about why I was interested in those images and display it back to me. For example, one of my paintings prior to grad school was, again, thinking about these caricatures. I had Halle Berry, I thought about Tyra Banks, and so I formulated Tyra Banks as she was like-

Speaker 1:
[22:55] Was Tyra in the middle from 2023?

Speaker 2:
[22:58] I depicted her in the Middle East, basically. I thought about my mom, single mom with two daughters. We were watching America's Next Top Model growing up, different ways of like I was seeing and thinking about culture growing up just resurfaced, and so why not put this like another character in this like abnormal space, and like see what kind of conversation goes from there. So like at that time, that was like my way of like thinking about digital art and physical paintings and ways that wish they can merge. But like now, that's not how I work at all. So I feel like things have shifted in a way that I think has just been important.

Speaker 1:
[23:35] So what are you shifting away from? Is it just a process of self-discovery, more discovering what you like through graduate school or through living, or is it trying to move away or towards something?

Speaker 2:
[23:46] Oh yeah, absolutely moving towards something. I feel like as much as I admire and was interested in what the Graspill experience gave me, this is all work that I have been just taking in on my own time. And so it began with a lot more listening, listening in silence, spending time with silence. The Internet is loud, everywhere around us is loud. And so I think if I wasn't listening to myself and what the work was actively speaking or saying, because if you sit long enough, if you sit straight at your work in the studio for two hours long or more, it just starts coming to you. And so I think I spent a lot of more time listening, and then being still in silence, and then that has really generated the work that I've been making today. That feels a little bit more different than starting off from the digital and going off from there.

Speaker 1:
[24:37] I have not seen your work in person. I've only seen it digitally. So I'm going to get a big dose of Cruz, double dose of Cruz in this coming season. But the works I have seen featured a lot of female or fem black figures with a very unplaceable emotional tenor that sometimes verges towards the monstrous, I'd say. Is that still what you're exploring? Are you moving towards a new thing with the new projects, or am I even reading those images correctly? I'm thinking of one where there's a figure taking a selfie and she has yellow teeth.

Speaker 2:
[25:16] Again, that was when I was referencing more from this photo that I had of someone taking a selfie in Harlem, and I incorporated a lot of different elements to amplify the expression a bit more. For that, it's hard to say where it comes from besides my neighbors growing up were otherworldly. I feel like I've already experienced what otherworldly beings or creatures or humans look like, just growing up in the city and being surrounded by anyone and everyone and I held on to what that felt like. The work that I was making that was depicting that emotion, it was highlighting the people that I grew up with, that I felt like I grew up with, that you didn't really know too fully their story, but they were right there in your face and you felt tingly or charged by that. All those portraitures was just me recounting those moments of like, ding, something like this, I'm interacting with this human that isn't no longer a real human, but it feels fun to just go in and start creating and working around with that tingling cessation.

Speaker 1:
[26:28] I'll tell you how I naturally read them, just looking at them is that there has been this big tradition of, it's been very much at the center of art for the last 10 or more years of the black figuration, that some of the artists who came out of Yale, like Wiley and Thomas are major avatars of, and that's such a heroic and idiom, like creating really detractive, almost like fashiony figures. Then I look at these images that you're working with, it really just seems to be resisting that, or it's looking at the image in a different way. It's almost trying to draw out some image that energy in these figures or images that's almost hard to pin down. They seem to be moving towards some sort of point of undefined ability. Is this an attractive figure or a figure that I'm scared of or something like that?

Speaker 2:
[27:27] I love that because that is true. I feel like, especially at school, there's always this talk about figuration and part of the work is just, okay, let's cancel out the noise and what these hierarchies are trying to tell you. It goes back to what horror means to me. Horror is simply a tool, a language that I use that feels right. I'm not trying to brand the work out with it at the same time. It shows up because it's a way of holding tension. I truly think it's a good way of tying in humor, beauty, the grotesque, honesty all together, and it lets me sit within that uncertainty because the unknown is scary. Everyone can absolutely for sure feel like the uncertainty of a human existence is frightening. So I'm not really trying to create these jump scare, shock value experiences. It's really about the energy of your body being alert, almost buzzing, it's almost tingling, a sense of haunting that isn't scary. But when you finally are sitting down by yourself and you let your guard down after being human for 24-7, what is starting to come up and appear for you? You can't help but to feel a sense of unnerveness, but it's thrilling. It's a thrilling pathway to figure out what we're doing here.

Speaker 1:
[28:45] Are you talking horror movies or just horror content?

Speaker 2:
[28:48] Not even horror movies. I don't really watch that many movies. Horror as in the boiler room in the Bronx and how it's steaming and it's hot and you're trapped and you're wondering what's happening.

Speaker 1:
[28:59] The feeling of horror from there. Letting yourself feel the feeling of horror.

Speaker 2:
[29:03] Absolutely. That's where I mean there's different feelings of that. It's not always a shock or in your face. It's something that lingers a little bit longer, and I liked that feeling of what is lingering even after dark.

Speaker 1:
[29:15] There is some, it's not horror elements, but fantasy elements in some of the paintings, like elf creatures or creaturely aspects of it. I know that connects to the folklore aspects that you're interested in from other things, right? So there's some supernatural stuff going on in there.

Speaker 2:
[29:30] Absolutely. I think again, the supernatural, it relates to my imagination of what I was enjoying growing up. I felt like I was seeing fairies in Central Park, I was like seeing the goblins underneath the pot steaming hole. So I think it's for me, it's just like recapturing moments that I saw was like glimpsing past me, that I wasn't really supposed to see, but then I happened to like, they slipped up or a character slipped up and I caught them in the way. So I think like, it has been like a good, a natural language is everything I'm making has just been natural and not forced. And so sometimes it calls for a pointy ear or a wing that is kind of broken.

Speaker 1:
[30:12] The people I know who are really into horror movies, that is, which I do not get. Not my thing, but my friend was telling me, well, the thing is you feel really in your body. You get snapped out of your head and for this like two hour period, you're just like, you're locked in because you're waiting for the bad thing to happen. I do think that that's very now. If I had to guess why the curators from these different shows sort of converged around you as one of the artists who they would both be interested in, it has to do with the way your works capture mood. The Whitney in their statement around this biennial says, rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney biennial foregrounds mood and texture. I do see a lot of artists coming up in this moment moving away from meaning or trying to make a clear statement and really towards mood and texture. Do you feel that? Does that resonate with you?

Speaker 2:
[31:10] Yeah. I do think, again, with process, it is about mood for me, absolutely. I really like that you mentioned the horror movie enjoyers would have those two hours of feeling that auto-bodied. For me, I want that experience endlessly the whole time you're looking at my work. Duration matters in that way of how can I really capture and freeze the person in that time. Sit with the moods that may come up, or when they go home and they have a dream, and they would be like, I remember exactly where I saw this from, or something like that, and mood really helps it. We're afraid of our emotions. So I think even I am trying to, as an artist right now, I feel like I'm constantly embattling my own emotions. The work, it's speaking to beyond me, beyond meaning, beyond context. But at the same time, there is a lot of meaning. It's very specific. For sure.

Speaker 1:
[32:05] Well, I mean, there's a lot of meaning in mood. It's a meaning that is kind of at a right angle to words, or like, yeah, snaps you out of your head. In the case of that feeling that horror gives you, how do you feel about explaining your work? I mean, this is a pitfall of biennials. People are always complaining about the explanations of the text. And someone like you doing work that's leaning into feelings, how do you feel about words?

Speaker 2:
[32:32] I've definitely have maintained my love of trying to find meaning while I'm trying to find how important it is to write about my work. I feel like my understanding of writing and art making was always within this theoretical lens of like there has to be some type of academic language or a place in art history for your work to like, if you're aligned with and maybe that was why I always had some like kind of disconnect with writing. But then like I learned that my work is calling for different modes of communicating that is beyond the visual. I'm like a super visual person. So already, I feel like when I'm making something, words are not always there to qualify what I want. But I learned that through making a play or writing a script about like the works that is like speaking together when a human is no longer in present in the space. What are different ways of like words and language that can speak to the art I'm making? But it's an ongoing process. I feel like still to this day, my artist statement is not like what I want it to be. It's going to be just like an ongoing process.

Speaker 1:
[33:38] A terribly challenging form of writing. I've taught artist statements before and it's just, I know that it fries artist's brains because you're there to make visual objects.

Speaker 2:
[33:47] But I feel like I'm close. I'm inching towards, okay, maybe this language is doing something right, but then it just, it flattens. I'm still just trying to figure something else out.

Speaker 1:
[33:56] So that was the other thing I wanted to talk to you now that you mentioned it is medium. So you're doing a mixed media installation at the Whitney. And something I was looking through the artists in these shows and others upcoming and just noticing how much with artists now, it's not exactly new, but I was really feeling it in these lists. It's like nobody works in a medium. Their artist statement is never like, I am a painter. It's always like, I do everything. I work in writing and curating and the internet and performance. And I was almost thinking, you know, we should just assume all artists basically do everything unless they state, I am focused on this. What do you think that is?

Speaker 2:
[34:43] Again, I just got out of grad school. You're fit into these categories, these labels like you're a painter, a sculpture. I was always against that. Same with these categories of like, if you're a painter, are you figurative? Are you abstract? For me, it's just like an artist, I feel like I make work and I would use any medium by any means necessary for me to get my point or feeling across, for me to create this experience. If it calls for a painting, I will use a painting or a video, I'll use it. For me, it's really about dismantling these hierarchies. I'm against these hierarchies of one medium can capture attention much more longer than the other ones. I feel like I'm constantly trying to play with what's given to me because right now it feels like this endless field. Because of the time we're in, we can have access to different mediums and work with them, and have it ordered and delivered to us in our studio doorsteps. Then it's like, how can I challenge that easy accessibility that I'm already feeling even more so, and that causes for spending time, a long time playing and really mushing the mediums together. I like to get really experimental math scientists because I did travel soccer growing up, and then I also did debate and Lego robotics competitions. For me, it's like all of these things is already a part of me. I'm already this living embodiment of my parents putting me into every after-school activities, so then why not? If art is already embodied as well, I can't be tied down, I just can't.

Speaker 1:
[36:15] Yeah, I think that's how a lot of people feel it. What I wonder about it is the idea of mastering a medium, to mash them together well, don't you have to get the rules of one or both?

Speaker 2:
[36:25] Absolutely. I think that's why painting comes into a good forefront. These spaces still want to see paintings and luckily, I've had a long time of figuring out light and shadow, and figuring out how to do a figure or an animal, and spending time working with what I know about painting, how to use oil paint. That just comes from the territory of doing art growing up all my life. The one thing that I'm still striving for is to figure out how I can make a sculpture that really feels not well-funded. I feel like a lot of my work right now has been a lot of things that I have the control ability to make, and I was able to do it with the resources that I have. So even seeing work at Dia Beacon, that feels like a sense of, okay, this is maybe one point in a way of mastering sculpture. But at the same time, that wasn't always my direction of entering sculpture or I wasn't really so attuned to sculpture as these clean cut lines. For me, it was more so like the Abigail DeVille or Pepon Osadio was making these installations of memories and that was maximalist or had a sense of vibrating history that I felt like I saw more within my family lineage and whatnot. So already like this, how could you, what I would say, this mastery of mediums, it comes from, I have a long ways to go. I'm only 27. So I feel like I have the rest of my timeline to really figure out how much further I can push this medium and whatnot.

Speaker 1:
[37:58] So yes, you are an emerging artist right now in this moment, and I'm sure that's a lot of pressure. I wonder how you think about that pressure. Is there advice that anybody's giving you, these curators or dealers, about how to position yourself as this attention converges on you?

Speaker 2:
[38:16] Honestly, no, there hasn't really been any advice that stuck with me. If anything, it was exactly what someone would say, like I should apply to something, like it was like a residency or a grant before I no longer qualify as an emerging artist. That freaked me out or that confused me in a bit. Yeah, it confused me because I hadn't really been thinking of myself in these categories, emerging, established, whatever comes after that. I've been making work since I was young, so it always felt like this continuous practice for me. To then be like, okay, well, there's going to be a certain cutoff for you to no longer get into this residency because you may not be emerging anymore. I was like, that's freaky. I feel like for me, it made me aware of how much an art world can categorize and organize people in these timelines, and that itself is the advice. People are really thinking about art in a totally different way that I am processing my body as an artist, and it feels a little bit separate from the act of making itself.

Speaker 1:
[39:21] So is there advice you would give to others then?

Speaker 2:
[39:24] Yeah. I would definitely say use discernment, follow instincts, know when it's time to leave the studio, protect your energy, you're in it for a long, long time, so try to maintain this self.

Speaker 1:
[39:37] Well, Taina, it's been great to talk to you. I'm really looking forward to actually seeing the work when these shows open.

Speaker 2:
[39:43] Thank you so much, Ben.

Speaker 1:
[39:45] The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Kate Brown, Ben Davis, Caroline Goldstein, and Naomi Ray. Thanks for listening and see you next week.