- (Music) I had the pleasure of meeting Rena
Detrixhe last month when she was here installing
her beautiful Red Dirt Rug in our Ephemera
exhibit downstairs.
And when we made our appointment to meet,
I walked over to the museum and she was coming
out of the gallery.
And I knew she had been working for days with
this red dirt that she had brought up from
Oklahoma.
And she stepped out of the gallery and she
was dressed in all white.
And when she walked out I was immediately
struck with the realization that this young
woman is very much like her artworks.
She has this wonderful understated beauty
and simplicity, which you'll see in a few
minutes with her artwork, as well as a great
sense of profundity and depth.
Rena Detrixhe is in her second year of an
Artist Fellowship in Tulsa but she's originally
from Kansas.
And she earned a BFA in Expanded Media and
Art History from KU (yaye, art history) in
2013 where she received numerous awards and
scholarships and her education was further
enhanced with a semester abroad in Seoul,
Korea.
In 2015, Rena was awarded a studio residency
with the Charlotte Street Foundation here
in Kansas City.
Additionally, Rena Detrixhe has exhibited
in mini group and solo exhibitions to include
the Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, the
Spencer Museum of Art and Lawrence, the Grand
Rapids Public Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The Hoffman Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
The Taubman Museum in Roanoke, Virginia.
The Form & Concept center in Sante Fe, New
Mexico and the Kansas City Crossroads Gallery.
Our Red Dirt Rug is an excellent example of
the fleeting quality of many of Rena's works
and her ability to use natural materials in
such a way that the presence of humanity is
directly recognized as well.
Using items that are typically discarded or
disregarded such as tea bags, dryer sheets,
seed pods or dirt, Rena Detrixhe presents
to the viewer a temporary snapshot of nature
imprinted by humankind.
I know you're going to thoroughly enjoy many
of Rena's works she'll show you here in a
few minutes.
I find them all simply stunning.
Please welcome, Rena Detrixhe (applause).
- Hello.
Thank you all for coming.
Thanks, Allison, for that introduction.
It is really, really wonderful to be at the
Nerman today, this is one of my favorite places.
And I want to start off just by saying a few
thank-you's and a few acknowledgements.
I want to say thank you to Bruce Hartman for
inviting me to be a part of this beautiful
exhibition.
So thrilled to be here.
And I want to mention a few influential women
that are also showing at this museum right
now who it's really just an honor to be in
proximity to.
I'm so happy to be in the same room at Susan
White and her beautiful thorn installation,
River of Solace, River of Hope.
Across the atrium, we have May Tveit who teaches
at my Alma Mater, the University of Kansas.
And I'm a big fan of her work; it's really
amazing to be in her proximity as well.
And then tonight, as Katherine was saying,
we have a show opening this evening as well
of the Charlotte Street Fellows, including
one of my friends and mentors, Karen McCoy.
And it's really just quite a delight to have
our work in the same space in this museum,
so thank you, Bruce.
I grew up about 15 miles south of a little
boomtown called Russell, Kansas.
It's a farming and agricultural community.
And I lived in about three old limestone houses
by the age of 6.
When my parents purchased this house where
I would spend most of my childhood, it was
just the limestone frame of a house.
It had holes for windows, dirt for floors,
didn't have a bathroom.
Before we moved in, they would work on it
a lot.
They fixed it up and made it livable.
They made it comfortable.
They added a bathroom, thanks in large part
to my big sister who was a teenager at the
time.
And so, I spent a lot of time outside collecting
things, picking up stones and sticks and bones.
And, for instance, while I was playing, my
parents were repairing the mortar of this
house brick-by-brick by hand.
And so I won't try to give you my whole life
story in 15 or 20 minutes, but I start here
because this place has really shaped the way
that I see the world.
The way I approach material and process and
work.
I developed a reverence for nature, for slow
and careful labor, and a deep connection to
place.
And when I say a deep connection to place,
for example, I was aware on some level, even
as a child, that the walls of my house had
embedded in them millions year-old fossils
in this limestone.
My work often begins with collected or scavenged
materials.
I'm guided by the nature of the material and
I spend time with it until my hands develop
a means to respond.
Sometimes objects lay dormant in my studio
for years until an idea surfaces.
Most often an idea will be the impetus for
working with a certain material.
The forms I create are informed by the intrinsic
and poetic quality that live in these things,
like seeds, petals, berries and soil.
So this is an image of the first rug that
I ever made several years ago.
The spiky fruit of sweetgum tree are collected,
sorted, threaded together to become the form
of a rug.
The subtle variation in color is a result
of different seasons, different years.
They might resemble both tree rings or a braided
or woven rug.
The textile form is something that I return
to often.
It brings these materials into the realm of
the domestic or the familiar, but also, these
are objects that we have a personal reverence
for.
Handmade objects that we treasure for their
sentimental aesthetic or historical value.
I'm interested in the tactility, the relationship
to the hand, to time, and the process involved.
And I liken my process in the studio to these
meticulous hand labors like weaving, crochet
and embroidery.
This piece is entitled Heirloom and it's a
tablecloth made of gathered seeds.
I'm as interested in the act of collecting
as the act of making.
And as a sort of experimental performance
or a challenge to myself, I once set out to
pick every berry off of a single tree.
It was also at a busy bus stop so I had a
large audience for this performance.
I would eventually fail this experiment.
I did not succeed in stripping every berry
off of this tree due to some combination of
cold weather, insufficient ladder and potential
reprimand.
I did, however, succeed in stripping the lower
branches of the tree, creating sort of a horizon
line.
Originally, I didn't have any intention of
ever using this material that I collected,
in fact; I challenged myself to focus just
on the act of collecting.
Of course, I would eventually fail that challenge
as well.
The berries sat and dried in my studio for
a couple of years and I would go back and
visit this tree occasionally.
And upon visiting it one time, I found that
there was all this construction of the sidewalk
and street and the tree had been totally removed.
So at that point I gave myself permission
to return to this material.
It occurred to me that the material I collected
-- it's actually a crab apple tree so they're
not really berries but they look more like
a berry than an apple.
So it occurred to me that this might be the
only remains of this tree and probably no
one would even remember that it was there
aside from me and maybe a few people who worked
in that building.
And certainly no one else had this intimate
relationship with the tree.
And so I created a piece that became a memory
of that tree and retracing of the act of collecting
the fruit, a sort of eulogy.
I drilled a tiny hole in each berry, threaded
them together, making a map-like structure,
reminiscent of those lower branches.
By the time the piece was complete, each individual
piece of fruit had passed through my hands
at least three times.
Once when plucked, again when drilled, and
again when threaded.
The making of this work also coincided with
a loss in my family and I began to treat the
material as though it were the last reminders
of a loved one.
I obsessively saved each fallen stem and bits
of tiny branch, all the broken berry pieces
and even the dust from drilling each hole
and these remnants became a part of the piece
as well.
So these themes of loss and memory and eulogy
in relation to process, material and labor,
were becoming a part of my language.
In the fall of 2015, I was accepted into a
residency program, a 1 to 3-year fellowship
in Oklahoma called the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
For me, this long-term residency was an opportunity
to really root in a place, to research, to
try and fail and experiment and create new
work.
So as an artist, I set about getting to know
this place I was in.
I knew a little, but I began to really dig
into the history and began to understand what
has taken place on this ground, and also what's
taken place to this ground and deep beneath
this ground.
Oklahoma is known for the oil and natural
gas industry.
It's home to the pipeline crossroads of the
world in Cushing, Oklahoma; that's what this
top image is from.
More recently, due to fracking, it has become
known for earthquakes.
It surpassed California in seismic activity
in 2015.
So I just paired this image together to kind
of show the contrast of sort of a bucolic
Oklahoma and also this major industry.
But it occurred to me that the scale might
be kind of deceiving.
One of these oil storage containers could
fit all of those buffalo inside of it pretty
comfortably.
Oklahoma was one of the last states to enter
the Union and it's only been a State for a
little over 100 years.
It was Indian Territory for many years.
Many tribes were relocated here.
The Trail of Tears ended in Oklahoma but this
is just one of many relocations.
As a result, there are 39 federally recognized
tribes in Oklahoma and even more that are
not federally recognized.
And so I'd like to just list these names as
a way of recognizing them.
And I apologize, I'll do my best on pronunciation.
Absentee Shawnee, Alabama, Apache, Caddo,
Cherokee, Cheyenne and Arapaho, Chickasaw,
Choctaw, Citizen Potawatomi, Comanche, Delaware
Nation, Delaware Tribe, Eastern Shawnee, Fort
Sill Apache, Iowa, Kaw, Kialegee, Kickapoo,
Kiowa, Miami, Modoc, Muscogee (Creek), Osage,
Otoe-Missouria, Ottawa, Pawnee, Peoria, Ponca,
Quapaw, Sac and Fox, Seminole, Seneca-Cayuga,
Shawnee, Thlopthlocco, Tonkawa, United Keetoowah,
Wichita, Wyandotte.
To draw a comparison, Kansas has two federally
recognized tribes, the Kickapoo and the Prairie
Band of the Potawatomi.
For my residency, I was transplanted to Downtown
Tulsa, a fairly recently redeveloped arts
district.
This is a map of my neighborhood.
So the map on the right shows historic, the
historic neighborhood of Greenwood, which
was a famous historic black neighborhood in
Tulsa.
It was burned to the ground in 1921 in what's
known as the Tulsa Race Riot.
In which a white mob looted and burned nearly
all the houses and businesses of the prominent,
vibrant black neighborhood.
At least 300 people were killed.
It was the deadliest act of racial violence
in our country's history.
So the image on the left is the current map
of the neighborhood.
And I live and work in what's until recently
been known as the Brady Arts District.
The Brady Arts District is named after a man
named Tate Brady, who was one of the founders
of Tulsa, a known member of the KKK and one
of the orchestrators of the massacre known
as the Tulsa Race Riot.
A little strip of yellow is where the current
arts district and historic Greenwood overlap.
And then the red arrow in both images is where
my studio is located.
So I share these things not to be anecdotal
but because living here in the location of
this history, in a neighborhood that's very
much still reckoning, has informed my practice
and my thinking immensely.
Add to that, that I moved here in January
of 2016, the beginning of a deeply emotionally
and turbulent political year.
All this to say that Oklahoma is challenging.
It's complicated.
It's a place of great pride and beauty and
resilience and also profound sorrow.
History seem to sit close to the surface even
if they've been swept under the rug.
And these histories and how they relate to
both land and to people, I think, speak to
a larger issue of how we as Americans or we
as humans relate to our world.
The writer, Rilla Askew, who also wrote the
text for my work in this show, writes the
following about her home state.
This is a quote from her book, her recent
book of essays titled "Most American: Notes
From a Wounded Place".
"Too southern to be western, too western to
be southern, too Midwestern to be purely southwestern,
Oklahoma has kept the secret of its identity
as a chameleon does."
Oklahoma's history is a compressed, ironically
inverted miniature of the national narrative.
Unfolding in a matter of days and weeks and
months, sometimes hours rather than decades,
beginning with the Trail of Tears.
In terms of numbers and attitude and collective
forgetfulness, Oklahoma is predominantly white.
It is profoundly religious, politically conservative,
inextricably rooted to the land.
And this land, a vast skyscape of mountains
and lakes and prairies, is peopled with descendants
of pioneers and mountain folk, slaves and
Indians, entrepreneurs and oil barons, coal
miners, immigrants, farmers, cowboys and outlaws
-- an inheritance that is like the rest of
the country's except that in Oklahoma, we're
hardly a hundred years removed from these
roots.
So, before I ever move to Oklahoma, I was
told about its red dirt.
Red dirt is to Oklahoma as the Rocky Mountains
are to Colorado or as the Prairie as to Kansas.
Red dirt might be the defining geographical
feature of Oklahoma.
But it's also a signifier, it's a symbol and
it's an expression.
It's part of the language.
The name Oklahoma comes from two Choctaw words,"Okla"
meaning red and "humma" meaning people.
Businesses use "red dirt" in their names,
red dirt music is rooted in Oklahoma.
Red dirt is ubiquitous.
It is understood.
It symbolizes grit and perseverance, sorrow
and pain, spirit and resilience.
So as an artist, as someone who's sensitive
to both place and to material, I was drawn
to this rich, red soil.
Both for its beauty but also for its symbolic
properties and the memories that it holds.
I should also mention that my dad worked as
a soil conservation technician for 30 years
and my mother is a ceramicist so that may
have something to do with it as well.
While walking, I notice footprints on trails
and recognize these patterns as indicators
of human presence.
It would occur to me later that these physical
marks and the soil were both the result of
immediate impact, the footprint, and also
the result of repeated impact over time.
The heavily trafficked path had been tamped
and crushed so the soil was a fine and soft
dust allowing the footprint to be crisp and
visible.
I began developing a way to hone this type
of mark-making.
A way of speaking to both the physical memory
of the soil and this immediate mark, and also
the deeper memories held within the soil.
Soil does have a memory, scientifically, biologically
but also spiritually and emotionally.
There's a reason that we say "something happened
on our soil".
So I harvest this earth, transport it to my
studio and began processing.
I grind and sift and grind and sift meticulously
by hand or with a small grinding tool.
I sift through various levels of screen and
blast through a layer of silk organza.
As I am processing this soil physically, I'm
also processing, through research, the histories
and memories that are embedded in this material.
So it's the soil of the Dust Bowl which we
know as the worst manmade ecological disaster
in our country's history.
It holds the memory of settlers marching with
their families and animals of land runs, of
herds of bison, of drilling and fracking and
earthquakes.
I take the soles of shoes and I dissect their
patterns, cut them apart and use these shapes
to design an ornate carpet.
From a western perspective, this object is
decoration.
It's a symbol of value and wealth and opulence.
It's a utilitarian object to be used, something
to own, something to make beautiful, something
to cover over.
And the woven rug is the result of many hours
of careful labor.
The work is meditative and slow.
I spend hours spreading the soil and a thin
layer and carefully stamping the surface until
a pattern is slowly revealed on the surface.
I'll show just a couple of seconds of the
time lapse here.
This is documentation of a recent installation
that I did in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And the rug was a thousand square feet in
size.
It took about three weeks to install.
Try to get to a point where the light rakes
across so you can get a sense of the time.
So doing this, I am aware of each gesture,
the amount of pressure that each stamp requires.
There's a different hand and a different feel
to each tool that I'm using.
I'm aware of each movement of my body in relation
to the soil.
I describe this piece as a meditation on the
landscape but it's also a gesture.
So through this gesture and this touch, it's
suggesting a sensitivity and perhaps a slower,
more subtle or gentle kind of action.
There's a carefulness and a slowness involved
that might be contrary to how we typically
relate to our surroundings.
And it offers a sense of time or a scale of
time that we don't often afford ourselves
or that we aren't allowed to experience, typically,
in our daily lives.
I'll just let that run through.
So, you know, it asks, what if we each could
spend hundreds of hours getting to know our
surroundings?
I've started to open my process to the public
so that this gestural performative aspect
of the work is made visible.
This is more documentation from Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
And then once the work is complete, viewers
are invited to walk around the piece and experience
it up close.
In this case, we didn't have any stanchions
around the piece and there were some signage
up but visitors were more or less just allowed
to interact with the piece as they would.
I've been surprised and sort of charmed by
all the different ways that people view the
work.
Some people come and sit for a long time.
This guy on the left here brought binoculars;
that was really cool.
The rug is impermanent and malleable by design.
So sometimes the work is stepped on by both
humans and insects, interruptions occur and
I've come to expect them.
You might even say that I invite them.
The work is, like I said, sometimes stepped
on by insects.
This is some kind of little bug.
And the image on the right here shows a harsh
line where someone decided to see what would
happen when they rolled a coin.
Okay, I'm almost done.
I think I'm about -- time's up, but.
Like I said, the work is ephemeral and after
the exhibition, it's swept away.
I'm interested in this temporality and temporariness
in relation to a landscape, especially one
that's been drastically altered by human presence.
I believe that that impermanence and the anticipation
of loss while uncomfortable, is actually an
important feeling to sit with.
I've began to incorporate a closing meditation
and a reflection when the work is removed.
Participants are invited to reflect on the
work, the memories embedded in the soil, the
idea of impermanence in our lives, and in
relation to the earth to consider the ways
that we ascribe value to objects and to land,
to contemplate loss.
And then we sweep the soil together.
These closing gestures are not all sorrow
and loss.
There is an element of play and joy and letting
go.
Sometimes we feel the earth with our hands
and feet but always with intention.
Children are especially helpful in this process.
So the questions that continue to guide this
work are, can beauty and sorrow exist simultaneously?
What are the memories embedded in this material
and how can we respond to them and honor them?
How have we, as humans, altered and impacted
our environment, and is there an alternative
to how we relate to our world?
So I'll leave you with this very, very brief
meditation.
Thank you.
(Applause)
- Okay, I'm Samuel Davis from the Ceramics
Department here as JCCC.
And it's my great pleasure to introduce another
artist whose work is also included in the
show downstairs entitled Ephemera.
Kahlil Robert Irving is a multimedia artist
currently living and working in St. Louis,
Missouri.
In 2015, Kahlil received his BFA is Art History
and Ceramics (woohoo, ceramics) from the Kansas
City Art Institute.
In May of 2017, Irving earned his Master of
Fine Arts at Washington University of St.
Louis where he was also a Chancellor's Graduate
Fellow.
He is currently the 2017/ 2018 Alice C. Cole
Fellow at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Irving has studied abroad in Israel - The
Czech Republic, Vietnam -- Laos, Thailand
and Hungary, a place to which he recently
returned as a resident artist at the University
of Pecs.
His work has been exhibited internationally
and across the United States.
He has upcoming exhibitions in Port Chester,
New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Wellesley,
Massachusetts and Notre Dame, Indiana.
Most recently, his practice has involved making
objects that are to challenge constructs around
identity and culture in western civilization.
He wants to challenge realities of racism,
structural barriers that separate communities,
and objects that exist within the history
of the decorative of arts.
Please join me in welcoming Kahlil Robert
Irving (applause).
- That's quite an introduction.
Hopefully I can share some good stuff with
everybody today.
I really want to say thanks to Bruce.
Bruce saw my work at the Art Institute Auction
earlier this year and he just, like, he messaged
me.
He's like, hey, Kahlil, I'm coming to St.
Louis, I want to see your work.
And I was like, wow, oh shit; well, I need
to get to work then.
But I was actually working on an exhibition
with Photi Giovanis and the staff at Callicoon
Fine Arts in New York City, so I had the capacity
to take on the project to work with Bruce
here at the Nelson - or the Nerman -- and
everyone here.
And yeah, so my name is Kahlil Robert Irving.
And as all the things that Sam said for me,
it's a pleasure to be here and I wanted to
say thanks to Ari Fish, one of my biggest
fans and my mentor and one of my bestest friends.
And she's been helping me and pushing me this
whole time and like getting to graduate school
was the help of Ari Fish.
Getting to manage all of these things is because
I have this foundation and this grounding
and community and teamwork.
And I'm so glad that she was able to move
her schedule to be here with us today.
I'm just going to show some slides of, like,
my biography and where I come from and what
I've done.
And then kind of show you some of Hungary,
some of Israel.
And then show you about the work that was
exhibited in New York City.
In 1997, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri and
this is one of the first artworks that I had
seen at the Saint Louis Art Museum as a part
of an exhibition on Masks.
I mean, I was 7 and I was quite small.
I was really intimidated by these costumes
and cultural artifacts that were standing
still.
That sooner or later that I would learn that
those objects aren't meant to stand still
but they're supposed to be in movement.
This is me when I was 11 and this is the year
before I started making things out of clay.
And this is also, the like, it's a very important
year in my life so I, like, kind of show this
slide to kind of show perspective in relation
to where I was or who I was when I was younger
to who I am now.
And this is the last year I had met my, like
I saw my mother.
And it's a really kind of grounding place
because it would kind of come into play and,
like, affect me later on.
This is the first exhibition of contemporary
art that I saw is Gedi Sibony at the Contemporary
Art Museum of St Louis.
And next door at the Pulitzer Foundation was
Gordon Matta-Clark.
This is Gordon Matta-Clark's sculpture where
it's kind of these trash things and things
that he amassed off the street that then he
would put in baking trays and put into the
kiln and kind of, like, let be there for like
days on end.
And then we just happened to go back to where
the kilns were and, like, open them up and
see these assemblages that he made.
And it's funny.
I saw this photograph and I thought about
them in relation to what I had been doing
too.
And it was nice to see that these things were
still -- like I was able to find this photograph
because no one really knows about these works.
So I've been making ceramics since I was 12-years-old.
And through high school I participated in
a portfolio development program at Craft Alliance
Center for art and design in Saint Louis.
And I wanted to go to college.
I learned about college and I only applied
to two schools.
I applied to the Kansas City Art Institute
and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago told
me that I might not be smart enough so I would
have to take 5 years.
And I was like, whoa, I don't know if I could
go to school for 5 years.
And then Jonah Criswell called me and offered
me a full tuition scholarship to the Kansas
City Art Institute and that was kind of -- that
was kind of it.
I kind of pissed my pants on the bus.
I was heading to the ceramic studio and he
called me and said, "You know, I got some
good news."
And I said, "What is it?"
Then I found myself at the Art Institute and
this is a photograph of me and my colleagues
in the course in the spring semester, making
towers with Steve Whitacre.
And that's Steve.
That's Steve right there.
After that I went to New York City with the
infamous and famous, Russell Ferguson.
And me and six other colleagues traveled all
up and down the Manhattan Island and saw basically
anything and everything that we could.
Seeing the Alexander McQueen Exhibition before
it closed at The Met.
Learned what Chelsea art galleries were.
And also took the Staten Island Ferry across
this water to see the Statue of Liberty.
But while getting to New York, I never flew
on an airplane before.
And so I saw the partitioning of the ground
by the roads.
And flying into New York with Delta from Saint
Louis into LaGuardia, you kind of see the
expanse of the island and the city sprawling
across the distance.
And so I thought about how could I join these
experiences of what I was dealing with?
And when experiencing the land being sectioned
and the buildings protruding off the ground.
And so I created these constructed perspective
drawings of the buildings flattened but also
the land partitioned.
Then I returned and I entered the Kansas City
Art Institute ceramics department.
On the left is the kiln room and on the right
is the rest of the studio spaces.
And this is kind of where the education and
the foundation school made you realize who
you were and you became an artist from the
first day entering.
When you enter the ceramics department, you
kind of -- it's a compounded experience where
you then focus on the self.
Well hopefully you experience and deal with
reflection into who you are.
And the work that proceeds year after year
becomes more reflective, more complicated
and more rich from that institution of growing,
not only as an individual but with a collective
of people around you.
I'm going to skip ahead two years in my time
and show you some wall structures that I made.
Thinking back to those drawings that I made
when I was studying in New York City and working
in the studio, I thought about the...the course
was called Layered Narratives.
At the time, Cary Esser, the Chair, she shared
the, you know what you get, the syllabus.
And you know I didn't understand what that
meant so I just wanted to make stuff.
And so I just, I started making these.
And I didn't learn what layered narrative
was until the end of the course.
But at least I learned something and I got
a ton of work out of the experience.
The first set of tiles is me carving into
the surface and building structures and using
glazes to have textures on top of the flat
two-dimensional plane.
These tiles are addressed with a certain texture
construction used by hammering a chisel into
tiles over and over.
Instead of painting waves to signify water,
I used the undulation of the carving and the
pressing into the tiles to think about the
water and the, kind of create like a self-made
map.
Like a kind of abstract East Coast and Northwestern
Africa and Southwestern Europe.
Just as a way to play because I had never,
I had just got back from Hungary and I was
always looking at the map.
And soon to come to find out I would study
in Hungary for 7 months.
But before going there, I went to Vietnam,
Thailand then Laos.
This is one of my images that I'm going to
share from Bangkok.
And in Bangkok there's a lot of construction
but there's also a lot of halted construction.
So a lot of buildings are covered with these
green tarps that act as skins on these large
buildings with structures underneath them.
And I add this in here not necessarily because
it's something that I'm going to use and reference
in my work but it's just an experience I want
to share with everybody when I get my artist
lectures.
This is an image of the interior courtyard
at the International Ceramics Studio.
I worked there and studied with George Timock
in 2012 and then I returned in 2017 for seven
months.
We fired this wood kiln one time.
When I got there it was brutally cold, it
was really, it was snowing.
It was crazy.
I didn't know what I was doing or what was
going on.
I didn't know what I was going to make but
I told myself that I'm going to make something
that no one ever made before, but you know,
that's all good and nice or whatever.
But I was searching for something specific
and I ended up adding everything that I could
find into a kind of makeshift mold that then
would make these large blocks filled with
found objects, personal objects, rice, paper,
whatever I could find.
And then I would cut the object after it's
fired to 1,300 degrees with a masonry saw.
And so what you're seeing in these images
is the cavities and crevices of objects that
I burned away through the process of firing
ceramics in the kiln.
I use it as a way to imbue all these things
that I had been touching into these objects
that are quite abstract.
And this is another one.
If you ever, like, want to see one of these
pieces in person, you can make an appointment
with Cary Esser or Casey Whittier or Paul
Donnelly and he can go to the teaching collection
at the Kansas City Art Institute and you can
see this one.
This one lives in Kansas City.
And this is one of my favorites.
You can see the porcellaneous material on
the bottom and a stoneware material above.
That's the inside and this is the outside.
The red, the yellow and the blue are all applied
colors.
The rest of the colors in the object are all
from the transformation in the kiln.
And so the reds and oranges are on the right
side.
I mean I kind of put everything inside...wood,
plastics.
Kind of dangerous but it worked out.
And I learned something, and this is the foundation
and the beginning of making those works that
are downstairs in the galleries where -- and
as I go on I'll tell you how I got to where
we are.
This is Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
in Jerusalem.
And this is what I saw out of my apartment,
the 25-foot tall separation wall that Israel
has built to occupy Palestine.
And that was really difficult for me because
my name is Kahlil and Kahlil is Arabic and
it's a very prominent name in Arabic and in
Arabic cultures and communities.
So I was in a place where I had knew nothing
about that.
I mean I only knew that I'm named after Kahlil
Gibran.
My father's name was Gibran, my name is Kahlil
and that was kind of it.
I read the prophet every now and then but
then you'd really don't know anything unless,
like, because I was born here.
And when I went to Israel that kind of, like,
it like shifted my perspective on who I am
and how I operate in the world.
These are some sculptures that I made.
The one on the left and has include sand from
the Red Sea.
And then through some of the other works,
there's sand from the Mediterranean Sea.
And I did do some dangerous stuff in Israel.
This is the bottom of my Converse shoe right
here inside this piece.
I tell you, do not do this at any school,
do not do it.
I was fortunate because there was a huge snow
storm that hit Jerusalem that had, it was
the worst in like history, like in 120 years.
It shut down Jerusalem for like a week-and-a-half
so my work was in the kiln.
And it was firing through the storm.
So no one, you know, no one had to deal with
whatever was going on in the studio.
This is another for you.
The wood...wood is quite expensive in Israel
so I used all this material found on the schools,
like in the school's area.
And the bricks have like this signage that's
certifying it as a well-made Israeli cinderblock.
So I was like, well I'll put that information
in there too.
This is the bottom, the other bottom of my
Converse shoe right here.
But I was thinking about the landscape, what
was available to the students in Israel and
then how could I really invest myself and
participate as if I was really a student at
Bezalel.
So I bought all the clay that they bought
and I did the things that they do and I don't
really speak, I don't speak any Hebrew so
that was, like, really the only difference.
I eat falafel with them every day so I felt
like I was a part of the group.
This is a passing image of my time visiting
Ramallah, Jericho, Hebron.
Just a huge tour through the West Bank.
Okay, that's half.
Now to the second half.
This is an image of Delftware ceramics from
the Netherlands.
This is called Garniture.
Learning about Garniture will further inform
other works that I am making.
But in the museum downstairs in the galleries,
you can see that works have a blue flower
decoration on the surface.
I'm thinking through ceramics as a kind of
a historical trajectory, not just a material
that's present that I can make things from,
but that there's a whole slew of other people
and other things happening or that has happened
in the past as an impetus of how I kind of
deal with what's going on today.
These are self-porcelain vases.
So these are made in France but they have
elephants on them as if they're Asian porcelains
and they have this, like, really weird motif
or these motifs on the surface.
These actually live at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York if you'd like to see them.
And then these are some Japanese Imari vases
from the 18th Century.
See the connection?
Do you see a relationship of the two sets
that I shared at first to this one?
For me that's quite interesting and I wonder
why that is and what makes that relationship
happen.
Like what made Europeans really want to have
porcelain in Europe?
What made, I forget his name, but the person
who started the Meissen factory in Dresden
in 1710, what really forced him to want to
have hard-paced porcelain and produce objects
that look like, you know, that would spawn
the production of objects that look like this
and this.
Stemming from a history of porcelain production
in China and Japan and Korea that looks similar
to this.
I don't know.
So I came back to the Kansas City Art Institute
from studying abroad and I would look at stuff
on the street and I was like, well I could
go collect that stuff before it got in the
drain.
But instead of collecting stuff, I started
slip casting objects and slip dipping things.
And paper or paper cups and stuff in clay
and then firing the cups away because they
were paperless, less toxic.
I tried to do right, you know, try to have
a healthy studio practice.
I started to slip cast Styrofoam food containers,
to-go containers, soda bottles and cans.
I would amass these objects and I would throw
my scraps and cardboard boxes and then somehow
it turned into a piece.
I think I just got enough stuff in there that
then it became a work.
The work is decorated with porcelain enamels.
Some people call it "China paint", I'm trying
to reconfigure my mind to not necessarily
deal or operate in the same way we've inherited
from our colonialist past.
So calling things "China paint" or "China"
in your dish cabinet is really problematic
because it's not Chinese people sitting in
your cabinet with these white dishes, it's
porcellaneous or clay objects sitting that
you can or maybe not eat off of because your
grandmother says, don't take them out or touch
them because they're family heirlooms.
But there's some way that I have to figure
in my mind, even thinking about oriental rugs,
you know, it's not oriental rugs, they're
woven objects made by people on hours and
hours and hours and how do we really address
the issues of racism within our culture?
This is another process photograph of me applying
red iron oxide decals, or iron decals that
look red on the surface of one of my pieces.
And this is what it looks like finished.
This is called Fat City Covered in "The Sauce."
Fat City is the kind of aspect of the Saint
Louis Food Magazine talking about food and
then "the sauce" is the Kansas City.
Well, now it's like all Midwestern food talk
in the area.
This is -- so I used enamels, decals and lusters.
And this is an image of the way I send my
decals to the decal printing company in Georgia.
So I construct patterns, use found images.
This in the middle is fried chicken if you
didn't know.
The paisley on the top and the roses on the
bottom, these images have personal significance
and cultural significance.
And then they get applied to objects like
this one.
This is called Collaged Mass.
This is the surface on top of the food box.
The fried chicken patterning is applied to
look similar to, kind of like a very rough,
like a very rough image that you can't really
make out what it is, it's kind of a patchwork.
Filled in with silver, gold, roses.
The idea or the relationship of text on the
object where I apply it to maybe it looks
like, oh, maybe this is just covered in a
whole bunch of stuff.
We can take that off and then we can see what
this is.
But then I really thought about this work
and realized that it's also about scale.
The work that I made before was abstract.
It could be almost any scale.
This work we have a physical relationship
to because we have an idea of the size of
that food box.
We have a somewhat understanding of the size
of a soda bottle so it's not something that
could be an immersive landscape.
But this is actually carved from something
or coming from a specific place, compacted
like a trash pile in a dump.
And this work is called Popular Mass.
From one side it looks one way, and then from
the other side there's more information.
And this is another one.
Really trying to, like, I made these works,
at one time, I showed them, I shared and talked
about them and then I kind of -- I took them
to my apartment.
Hid them away a little bit.
And then I took them back to the studio and
then that's where I kind of breathed all the
decoration, all the physical information on
the surfaces.
And it took another, like, I took four months
to make them and I took another, like, 6 to
8 months to decorate all of them.
And it was a series of 7 to 8 objects.
Moving to Saint Louis for graduate school
I was confronted with a whole lot more things
working with Professor Denise Ward-Brown.
This is -- I named a piece Before and After
Sundown, Town in relation to, like, living
in the States, dealing with racism, and living
not too far from a town called Anna, Illinois.
And Anna, Illinois is an acronym for what
you can read on this Wikipedia screen shot.
At the same time my colleagues in Columbia,
Missouri were protesting the student government
and saying how you're treating us is inappropriate
and we're not going to deal with it.
Their group was called Concerned Student 1950
or the Johnson family reunion -- or no, just
Concerned Student 1950.
I titled a work of mine called Concerned Student
1950 or the Johnson Family Reunion.
And the situations of what's going on around
me really kind of comes into the work in dealing
with how to read or how a situation is progressing,
and then how things are kind of responded
to or created around them.
So I embed this iconography or newspapers
around these situations into my work.
So it's not necessarily legible at first glance
but it's within the work.
It's within the construction of what's going
on in those objects, like the piece downstairs
called Stacks Stilted and Shelved.
Even though it's just blue and white there's
so much more going on in that piece than what
you see.
So I was seeing a lot of things in graduate
school.
That's like a before and after, unfortunately.
But what is placed, what does it really mean
to live in a place like Saint Louis with a
certain relationship with it moving, coming
and going like I've had?
To really kind of get to the grounding to
understand who I am and what I'm doing in
my practice.
These soda bottles were made in 2013.
This is a piece of that one called Fat City
Covered in "The Sauce", it got embedded in
this recent work because it broke in shipping.
So I kind of reuse, recycle or up-cycle materials
or objects.
On the surface you can see a new pattern that
I made out of cigarette butts.
Michael Brown is memorializing my work here.
The short title of this work is In Remembrance
or In Memorial Of, I think.
I can't remember.
Kind of move so fast making this work.
Bruce got to see this work in progress.
I don't know if he's got to see it finished.
So I used a lot of images from Saint Louis.
I used newspapers from California, Missouri
and New York to add to the surface of these
objects and then it's like glazed and unglazed
porcelain and stoneware, slip cast objects.
Like a really groggy Terra Cotta slip that
I was using or a red clay slip.
Blue slip.
Clear glaze.
Mostly the glaze that I use in the studio
now is all clear glaze.
Any colors that are applied are either blue-colored
slips or decals, enamels, lusters.
This is an image of an installation or one
installation view of the work at Callicoon
Fine Arts in New York City.
It's, I think like a 12-foot by 15 or 17-foot
wall vinyl.
The title of the exhibition was Streets: Chains:
Cocktails.
And so I thought well, shoot, let's address
the wall.
And I made these really big prints that you'll
see later that I was going to put on top of
that wall.
But then I thought no, when you're dealing
with fencing, that means that there's a barrier
there.
And that you cannot enter or pass through
the space.
You literally have to walk around this wall
or this idea of a wall that I'm presenting
in the gallery to get to the other side.
I should have put some more details in this.
And this is the work on paper that you see
and you're confronted by when you turn that
wall of the chain-linked fence.
This is the image of that print that's framed.
This is an image of Saint Louis, one side
of Saint Louis that many people don't necessarily
see that often.
But there's like, similar to Kansas City,
there are over 10,000 vacant lots and 8,000
empty buildings.
How do we not, how do we think about revitalization
or reorganizing the environments in which
we live in and still address the issues but
grow collectively and not just continuing
to do what we've done through history?
Or what we know of our imperialist and colonialist
past.
Thanks (applause).
- Who's going to break the ice and ask a question?
Thank you.
- Upon your dirt rug, do you have that diagramed
out ahead of time so you know what you're
going to do or does it just kind of come as
you go?
- Yes.
It's carefully planned ahead of time.
Once I've cut apart all of the shoe pieces,
I scan them, create a digital rendering of
each one so then I have an alphabet of patterns
from all the different shoe pieces.
And I take those individual patterns and arrange
them digitally in Illustrator to create the
overall pattern of the rug.
And so, each of the individual patterns that
make up the pattern of the rug are designs
that I've come up with.
And some of them reference specific plants
or animals, and some of them reference agriculture
or industry.
There's a language of symbols that largely
relate to this interaction of the human or
the natural and the manmade world.
And so all of the symbols that I'm using,
whether they're floral patterns or they look
like animals or oil wells or what have you,
relate to that relationship.
And as I'm making the rug, I'm referring to
that pattern or blueprint.
- I have two for both artists.
Who do you do with the dirt when you're done
with the project?
And then for the other artist, I noticed that
you had newsprint, it looked like it was fired
onto the surface, how do you do that without
the images burning up?
- Right now I have about 42 buckets of 5-gallon
Home Depot buckets of soil sitting in my studio.
And so I take them back to Oklahoma and I'll
use them to create another installation.
Although eventually I imagine that the soil
will be returned to the landscape in one way
or another.
- Is your studio on the first floor?
- Yeah.
- Can you tell me what your, like what specifically
you're thinking about?
Like which images?
- Well the text from the newspapers and labels,
how do you manage to get those onto the ceramic
surface?
- So I'm going to take you like five seconds
through the whole process.
I make the pieces.
I put them into the kiln, fire them to 1,945
degrees.
Then I take them and glaze them and then I
fire them to 2,400 degrees basically.
And then I get them out and I look at them
and then I have materials.
The luster, the enamels and the decals; they're
all fired at separate different temperatures.
The black luster that I love; it's fired much
hotter than the decals per se, or the red
whatever.
Anything red, the fire is really, really low.
So if I want to get a decal that has red imagery
in it, newspaper, certain commercial decals
that are printed, I have to fire them really,
really low too.
So I get the images, like that big sheet that
I have with roses and fried chicken on it,
I send it to a company and they send me back
my sheet.
I cut out what I want and how I want it to
look on the ceramic.
I cut it out, put in a little bit of water.
Slide it onto the glaze surface and then I
put the object back into the kiln.
And determining on what, or depending on what
decal company I used, they regulate what temperature
I need to fire it to.
So it could be 1,627 degrees.
And so I get cones to look at when I'm firing
my decals, and my lusters and my enamels.
And I look into the kiln at that temperature
to make sure that when the computer's reading
1,627, my cone for 1,627 is also curled over
and then I can make sure -- like that's how
the imagery stays on there.
There's no like, solvents or anything.
Like I'm not adding any polyurethane to like
stick that stuff.
It's all embodied into the ceramic.
- It looks like that.
- I'm glad because I -- yeah.
- Thank you.
- You're welcome.
Yes, sir.
No, you go ahead.
- I was going to ask what the longevity of
one of those rugs is, if you know, if they
stay in a place for X-number of months.
I know they're meant to be destroyed, swept
up.
But I'm just sort of interested in the fact
that they may deteriorate a little bit.
Or how long has one been installed and stayed
looking the way you want it?
- They've been installed anywhere from a week
to months at a time.
I imagine that if no one really disturbed
it and there wasn't a lot of seismic activity
or something, or a leaky ceiling or something,
that it would last a long time.
I think probably it would start to settle
a little bit.
- Well is the surface a little more firmer
than soil would be?
And I know you imprint it and you use a trowel
on it and I was wondering if it was a little
more stable, I guess that's kind of what I
want to say.
- Yeah.
It's a clay-rich soil so it has a certain
weight to it.
But imagine spreading out flour on your countertop
and then making an impression in that.
That's what it's like.
It's just very loose and if you, you know,
blow on it or spread your fingers across it,
you'll make a mark.
So it's really loose, really malleable.
- Yes.
I was wondering can you recall anything particularly
memorable or unusual that you've found physically
as you were harvesting the soil.
And if so, does that ever inform what it ends
up looking like when you put it together?
- Most of the soil that I gather is just like,
it started out just on the side of the road
or a construction project or a farming project.
So, you know, it's everywhere you can find
a pile of red dirt really easily.
And then to do the large piece, I purchased
soil from a place that sells sand and gravel
and dirt and it's really just dirt when I
get it.
And I haven't found anything aside from bugs
and sticks and rocks.
But it's funny, I'd sit there kind of sifting
the soil for hours and hours and sometimes
my fellow residents in my program would come
and check on me.
One of my friends came in at one point and
asked, have you found anything yet?
And I realized that it looked like I was siphoning,
searching for something, and it was just kind
of nice to think about.
Like, you know, I'm not discovering objects
or crystals or rings or anything, but I'm
definitely searching.
- Kahlil, I'd ask you the same question.
Are you finding anything odd in the things
that move your work as a result of accidental
discoveries?
- I think...well yeah.
There was one time in Hungary, when I lived
there for so long, I put a steel can in my
piece and I didn't know what was going on.
You know I just, like, put it in there and
just said, you know like, we're going to fire
it up.
I take it out of the kiln, glaze it up.
Bow, okay bam, it's ready to go to high fire,
cool.
Fired to 1,300 degrees Celsius, that's really
hot.
Much hotter than standard studio, ceramic
studio pottery studios in the United States
is going.
So I was like, okay let's do it.
I open the kiln, I try to pick the piece up
off the shelf, like man, this piece won't
come off the shelf.
And I had put the steel can in there not understanding
that the steel melts at a lower temperature
than the porcelain I was firing, so it created
a glaze on the surface of the object.
But the steel can was not there anymore, it
was there only on the impression of the porcelain.
So there was a circular object with the void
of a can, but the can was still present in
some kind of way.
So that was pretty interesting.
But other than that I'm really trying to search.
I'm like really searching for like a freedom
that may not be present.
And like I think in the next place, like after
I've made this exhibition in New York and
I've made this work downstairs, now the new
work might be that place of like, how to present
the freedom that I've like, always been wanting
in this, like, just working in such abstract
way.
Like maybe the work now will be to scale.
You know, porcelain and ceramic, anything
clay when it's fired, it shrinks.
So maybe I will make things to where when
it fires, it doesn't shrink less than the
scale that we know it as but that it's made
to the scale that we know it as and then that
we can have a real relationship with those
things even though, or the imagery.
We can have a new relationship with the imagery
on the objects.
Yeah, I think that's like kind of where I'm
at.
Because the free, the liberated, like what
does it mean to be free?
What does it mean to be liberated?
What does it mean to be from earth and not
from the United States necessarily, like just.
Like I'm from the USA, you know?
Or I'm from Great Britain or I'm from blah,
blah, blah.
You know, like, what if we're from Earth and
I can just travel from place to place and
just experience the whole land in which we
live on.
And I want that to be in the work too.
- Kind of following up his question, do you
find, when you go and collect things, that
you're going to put in to make these abstract
shapes that you're creating, do you find there
are different things?
I mean, you've done a lot of traveling, obviously,
which is great.
It sounds wonderful.
- A lot of grant money.
- So are there different -- we had a discussion
with a clay artist just the other day in Topeka
about -- there was another artist there that
does installation stuff.
She was bemoaning the fact that there wasn't
a lot of trash around Topeka.
She wasn't finding interesting trash.
I'm just wondering if you find there to be
differences in different places you've been
and is that in the work?
- Well guess what?
I'm glad you asked that.
I just got back from Hungary for two-and-a-half
months working at the University of Pecs and
I made objects in the studio there.
And so, some of the paper and some of the
stuff that I have from my time there will
be embedded in decorating those objects.
So that will still, like there will be a certain
amount of that experience still contextualizing
that object through the title, through the
imagery, through the material specifically,
like, the enamels that I buy and the lusters
that I use, except cheap gold luster and silver
luster here in the States.
All of my lusters, all of my enamels all come
from Hungary.
So it's like, it's already; you know it's
like there.
But finding interesting trash.
So I started doing this print-making project
where I call it Street Views and I try to
make paper look like asphalt, look like the
street.
And so I use Sintra as a matrix and I, like,
stomp on it on the street and people look
at me funny because, like, what's this guy
doing outside stomping on this white thing?
And then I take the texture of the road and
then I take it into the studio and I ink it
up and add found objects on the surface.
I don't own a car so I walk to and from the
studio or to and from school.
And so I would find a myriad of things on
the road.
Soda cans, like in the big piece, The Big
Red Bow.
That big red bow is actually me inking up
the bow and putting it on the plate and taking
it off and not gluing it to the paper.
So it's a representation of that bow.
And so really, interesting things.
I found Chinese cigarette box, Chinese cigarettes.
There's a lot of Asian students or Chinese
students that go to Washington University
in Saint Louis.
I mean almost every school in the United States
has a lot of, a strong population of Asian,
international Asian students.
And so I was like okay, this Chinese cigarette
box.
And then I put that right next to an unfolded
Chinese food box, American Chinese food box
from Saint Louis, like from down the street.
So I can create these relationships between
these things that may not have any relationship
at all but it's kind of this constructed environment
or this reality with this thing.
I think I like create the interesting.
Not necessarily that I'm like going to find
it, but I can make it.
I think I can make it.
- I have a question for Kahlil.
- I'm doing a lot of talking.
- Yeah.
So I know that you're involved in a lot of
arts activism in Saint Louis and other places.
What do you feel, in these politically charged
times, what can we do as artists to effect
change with some of the major issues that
we are confronted with?
- Well I think for black people in America
and minorities, it's always been a politically
charged time.
So for most artists I know, it's always been
kind of a searching and a longing for a kind
of time for relaxation.
What I, like, I took this class in undergrad
with Reed Anderson in Art History called The
Artist Role in Society.
And through this course we kind of went through
all of the things that people have done in
the past.
And I think about, like all of the things
that people have done in the past, how can
that inform what we do today?
And for me, it's hard to say, to tell people
like, we got to be informed.
Because it's like if you get the wrong information
from the wrong place or what you think is
the right place, then you think you're informed.
So that's not a good avenue.
Just going around and not necessarily being
right and doing right and being a good person,
that also might not work because you might
not thinking hatred is a good thing and you're
doing the right thing so then that's not a
good avenue.
It's difficult.
It's really hard.
Because there's a situation that happened
at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis
and they exhibited an artist's work that were
completely devoid of any criticality that
everybody, like, what they were having against
everybody else's work, like thinking through
everyone else's work.
But they didn't have the same criticality
towards this work that they were presenting.
And they thought that bringing this work that
reconstructed images of torment and terror
in the United States was a way of, like, dealing
with we're-going-to-have-a-conversation-because-now-this-artwork's-up.
And I'm like, that's not necessarily.
Like the artwork has to work and operate right
for them to have that right conversation.
So I just say, like, having people who are
invested in similar and like-minded things.
Like getting to that progressive point, like
getting to that point past something that
we're all ailing through and working with
those people and standing true with those
people and continuing that practice.
I think the community is, like, kind of how
we get to that place of recognizing what and
how we can do things to get forward.
Because before we can do anything to do better,
the community has to, we have to do better
together before we can think about how we
can fix anything.
- Right.
Thank you.
- Yeah, I have a question for both artists.
In listening to both of you talk about your
work, I sort of did my own compare and contrast
and I've noticed a lot of similarities.
Both of you have done gathering, the use of
found objects in work.
You're both using clay yet in completely different
ways and the works are based on historical
things in American history.
And then the biggest difference is one of
you is making work that is meant to be permanent,
a permanent recognition of certain things
and then a temporary fossil.
So my question is have either of you noticed
those similarities and what can you take from
the other in noticing each other's work?
- Yeah, that's a really good question and
I definitely have noticed those similarities
and that's one of the really exciting things
about showing work with other artists and
working with curators is that you get to experience
your work in relation to other people's work.
And often you get a greater understanding
of your work through that.
This idea of a permanent object or an ephemeral
object is something that I'm always thinking
about in my own work.
I sometimes do make permanent objects too
but I'm really interested in the ephemeral
object.
And one of the reasons for that is because
of the way that we assign value to things.
So with this work, with the Red Dirt Rug work,
so much of it is influenced by how we humans
or, you know, specifically Americans, or doesn't
really matter, assign value to land.
And through that, all kinds of things happen.
So I'm interested in kind of removing that
in a way.
Like making an object that you really want
it to be permanent, you want to put that in
your house or you know, see it last, it's
really beautiful.
But knowing that it isn't going to last or
that it has that temporary quality.
And a lot of people have told me, you should
think of a way to make this permanent so that
you can sell them and support yourself.
And there's a, you know, there's something
to that and I haven't quite figured that out
yet.
But with this work, you know, it's totally
changed the concept of the piece for me.
I wouldn't do that.
You know, I may make a different work but
yeah, I don't know if that quite answers your
question.
Maybe I'll still think about it while you
answer.
- Can you ask your question one more time?
Just the question.
- So basically, based on the similarities
in doing a compare and contrast of each other's
work, what can you take from the other?
I guess the question would be based in the
permanent nature of your work and the temporary
nature of Rena's work.
- So when I look at her work I really think
about the Styrofoam food box and how it is
a permanent thing and I'm translating it into
ceramic material.
All of the things that I think I'm making
molds of and using are objects that will still
last forever because of the original object's
material history.
And I think thinking about her work in relationship
to my own; it's all about a time and a kind
of experience of when I'm going to and from
a place.
And so the impermanence of the work is my
experience of making the things that then
is embodied in the objects.
I don't think that I will, in the near future
I don't see myself making anything that's
like going to deteriorate with water, you
know, like I'm not going ever not think about
firing my pieces because that's also a part
of the history of like what I'm trying to
get at with the work.
And I think the best similarity between us
is that we're both, we're scrolling through
history and mining from the canon of objects
making of the past and using processes and
practices and objects as an impetus to get
to this other place.
That she's thinking through rug-making and
the material then adds meaning to that object.
And me the same.
And it's almost like, it's almost like her
dirt rugs have to be dirt.
My porcelain objects have to be made out of
porcelain because then they are consecrated
through a permanence in a way of the, not
only our experiences of making the things,
but they're consecrated through other people's
experiences of those things.
So even though they may go and live somewhere
else or be swept up into buckets, we think
and talk about them as impermanent and permanent,
but in the end they really are still permanent
because the experience is still, like, within
us.
