Tag Archives: Australia

Phone Tag: Interview with Olivia Koh

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Olivia Koh, His heart was stuffed with dead wings (‘Suicide’, After Lorca, Jack Spicer), 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

I speak with Melbourne-based artist Olivia Koh in this Phone Tag interview. Olivia takes poetry and historical colonial texts as a jumping off point for a reconsideration of their context, biases, and contemporary relevance, often using video as a medium. We discuss her recent projects as well as the alternative exhibition space she organizes and the economy of living as an artist in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

Linnea West: How do you know [former Phone Tag participant] Athena Thebus?

Olivia Koh: I met Athena through a friend in Melbourne. I think she’s a very generous person. She lent me her drone… I saw one of her works at a festival here. Maybe we’ll get to this in a minute, but I host a video website, which is an online database to host videos online called recess. We asked Athena to contribute to that next year. I’m looking forward—I know she does texts and installations and performances, but she makes videos as well.

LW: When you say you host, is that like being a curator?

OK: I’m not sure about the title for myself. Organizer? Because I’m basically an artist, so I don’t have that curatorial training. I work with two other artists from Melbourne, Kate Meakin and Nina Gilbert, and we facilitate putting works online that are film works or video works. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to people in Melbourne, but there’s a particular economy here around exhibiting. It can be expensive and quite competitive.

LW: So, the site is an alternative exhibition space?

OK: Yes, exactly. More simply, it’s an alternative exhibition space that’s accessible through the internet. We get writers or artists to both collaborate with the artist and to produce a text that sits alongside the video. If artists want to, they can leave their work on the site and then people can still access it after the exhibition.

It has been going for two years, so it’s just starting. There’s a lot to navigate. We’re trying to get some money for it, because now it is reliant on artists working for free, on us working for free. We’d love to change that, but at the same time, I think it’s good to make something of what you have.

LW: Totally. Is the format because of a particular interest in video or because of the economy of it?

OK: A bit of both for myself. Nina, Kate and I, we studied photography at the same art school, the VCA in Melbourne, at different times. We do have an interest in photography, and we’re bringing works with an interest in that medium, or thinking about how to navigate that in the contemporary moment…

How do you navigate having a video in a gallery? There weren’t many diverse approaches to doing that in galleries in Melbourne. Also, people are working so much, and they have works but they don’t always show them as a final product, so it was making space to show those. It sounds altruistic, but it’s been really great to see them—that’s a privilege as well.

Olivia Koh, Episodes, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: To back up a little bit, why did you need to borrow a drone from Athena?

OK: [laughs] I saw one of Athena’s works, Deep Water Dream Girl, and there was this amazing footage that she took in the Philippines. It was a video following her family and a certain island where they live. I was watching the video, and I thought I really would love to capture certain shots by air. I also went to the Philippines, and I’ve made a sculpture that I’ve been putting in the sea. I’ve been trying to film it by drone. That’s what I’ve been using it for, not that effectively…but practicing. 

LW: If you have to describe your practice in a couple of sentences, what do you say you make?

OK: I rewrite texts, found texts, and I collage them or sort of…go through what is there, whether it’s using video, or making text pieces as images or as sculptures. For example, I’ve looked at anthropological texts from the 1900s that were written about people in the Philippines, and I’ve looked at some that are about people in Australia at that time. In the past, they have definitely been social, like describing burial practices and mourning practices. There was a focus on a dead body or a body that can’t move or speak for itself.

Olivia Koh, Episodes, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: What are you working on now?

OK: I’ve been looking at poetry and looking at translated poems in the works of a California poet, Jack Spicer. He translated [Frederico] García Lorca, the Spanish poet. I had the idea to get some of those lines translated by a Filipina artist, Dennese Victoria. I’m using this text in a video called Episodes. I did a residency in Manila in 2017 and I’m producing a work from my time there. I’m trying to relate my experience as a tourist to certain texts about colonial “hygiene bureaucrats” that came to Manila from America in the early 1900s. In a text about colonial pathologies, a doctor and academic named Warwick Anderson talks about tropical neurasthenia—medical conditions that are basically nervous breakdowns, from colonizing guilt and the change felt traveling in a foreign environment. When I was in the Philippines, I was complaining so much about the weather, and I was really overwhelmed. I was also trying to study this particular history and thinking: “Oh no, have I got this?”

[laughter]

I’m trying to make the correlation between footage I’ve shot there and to the different layers of history written about the country.

LW: Who has influenced your practice?

OK: Locally, I’ve been influenced by a few friends who are great artists. One’s Rosie Isaac, who writes and makes performances. Lauren Burrow, who is an artist—a sculptor. I’ve been influenced by them in a day-to-day way. Also, being exposed to the processes of their work has been a really practical way of learning.

I read a lot. I like poetry. Other texts influence my work more than art… art isn’t my primary go-to. I’ve also been reading this book by Patty Chang called The Wandering Lake. It accumulates parts of an exhibition and a research trip to a migrating body of water in China. It’s about her searching to make the work, but also about having her own body in that landscape. I really loved that.

LW: Her work is narrative, and you’re working with text, which are already narrative. Do you think about that in your work? Are you trying to deconstruct the narrative, or are you trying to create a new thread?

OK: Sometimes I’m trying to create a new narrative, and sometimes to sit the narrative on top of an existing work, re-addressing preexisting texts from another perspective. Inserting myself into the narrative is a way of making myself responsible for what I’m making, as well, which I feel uncomfortable with—but it’s good to put myself in there. I’m trying to put myself more in there, to become more visible in my work. At the moment I’m trying to make a slightly more narrative video, with me as a “germologist”—a kind of 1900s hygiene bureaucrat—having a delirious experience and then going into a dream state, with texts and images and memory converging.

Olivia Koh, Ginebra San Miguel, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: Is this one of your first forays into performance?

OK: Yeah. Usually, I’m quite removed from it. I use my body to film, and I use a lot of handheld shots. I think that’s what makes my work less objective or removed than traditional films, like the body—my body—is in the film. It’s not professional cinema; it’s more haphazard. But I haven’t really been in front of the camera. I’ve just been behind it.

LW: That’s a big shift.

OK: Yeah, I’ll probably go back behind it. I like the way that performance can be—this is probably the wrong word—but integrated into an artwork in different mediums, like a performative sculpture, that kind of thing.

LW: When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

OK: I find that hard, actually. After I finished studying and I graduated as an artist, I started calling myself an artist. I really think it’s not about study though. Ideally, it’s about identification. Like, if you want to call yourself an artist, you’re an artist. Here it’s difficult to have it as a career—as in other places, I’m sure. Because a lot of people aren’t going to make a living off being an artist, it’s about having that dedication if you want to make work instead of doing other things.

LW: Is it important for an artist to be in a big city? Whether that is in Melbourne or a city like New York, or wherever. Or, is it better to be in a small place where maybe life’s a little easier, rent’s a little cheaper, and there can be more of a focus on making?

OK: I’ve only been here practicing a few years, so I haven’t had a diverse experience… I’m really not sure what it’s like in New York. I think it depends on whereabouts you are, what your relationship is with a city, if a focus of yours is exhibiting, or whether it is to be present for shows and stuff that happen in the city, or what you community is. It’s all about how you talk with other artists.

LW: Do you have a good community in Melbourne?

OK: Yeah, there are lots of talented people that I can talk to.

I would also like to experience art communities elsewhere. When I went to Manila, I really enjoyed meeting different groups of artists and filmmakers. They really supported each other in the way that they worked on each other’s projects. I thought that was really cool. They really knew each other’s work through making it, producing it. Also, they were there for each other to talk about the work or to see the work.

Olivia Koh, The blue tongue of the coastline (Ode for Walt Whitman, After Lorca, Jack Spicer), 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: What does an ideal day look like in the studio?

OK: I don’t think I’m particularly productive as a studio artist, so I’m probably not the best person to answer that.

LW: If not in the studio, an ideal day working?

OK: It’s when thoughts accumulate over a period of time. When I have those days when things are starting to make sense. That’s ideal. There’s so much time spent that is so frustrating, when I feel like I’m working but nothing is happening and the choices I make aren’t developing.

LW: The nature of your projects seem like they would take a long time.

OK: Yeah, relatively. This video work has taken me a year, but it grew from work over the past three or four years. I’ve framed the video in different ways and then have been making different versions. I’m very piecemeal with making works. It’s hard to really finish a work.

LW: How do you know when it’s done?

OK: I’d say, “Never.” I like to think of works as iterations. That’s the best way for myself. With all the work, because they’re not really serial pieces, they really change with the context…where it’s shown, when it’s shown.

LW: Those were all my questions. Thank you so much.

OK: Thanks, it was really nice to talk with you.

Phone Tag: Interview with Eugene Choi

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Body Scaffold II (Rest), 2015. Presented at Firstdraft, NSW. Photo: Kalanjay Dhir

In this Phone Tag interview, performance artist Eugene Choi talks about her practice as an artist and as a performer in the productions of others, and the dynamic exchange between the two. We also discuss her relationship with choreography and structure, learning from others, and trusting the work. Eugene earned a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and continues to develop her artistic practice in that city. She is currently on a residency at Artspace. Recent Phone Tag participant JD Reforma connected us for this interview.

 

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

 

LW: “How do you know JD?”

EC: “Ah! I met JD through…I guess just the art scene here. The first time I met JD was when he was a director at First Draft, which is a smaller gallery here. I was still doing my undergrad.

I was young, and shy, and didn’t know who to talk to. I think JD just smiled at me, and then I said, ‘Hi.’ Then we just started there.”

LW: “Do you feel like the art scene in Sydney is a place where you see the same familiar faces, where it feels very known? Or is it bigger than that?”

EC: “I think so. Especially this month, because March is art month in Sydney and it’s just banging parties and a lot of openings. Also, the Biennale just opened. Art month is always so crazy when the Biennale is opening. Everyone comes down for it, all the international curators are here. It’s really quite sociable.”

LW: “How do you like the Biennale, have you seen a lot of it?”

EC: “I haven’t really had the time to go and focus on it. I was all over the place last weekend. I was just in a development for a performance, just a little two‑week development, and did the performance on Friday.”

LW: “Interesting, let’s circle back to that. Generally speaking, if you have to tell someone, what you do as an artist: what do you do?”

EC: “I usually say I’m a performance‑based artist who does live performance and also is a performer/dancer for other artists. I also make performance for video. I make a lot of video work, but usually the video works are constituted with these large sculptural installations. I never just make a video work. It’s always within a larger installation.

I would say I am a performance‑based artist working with installation. Multidisciplinary. I usually work with the materiality of steel. I make structures out of scaffolding, from galvanized steel pipe. I have clamps, so I make different shapes and different structures. Then there’s always a screen, mounted on the structure or next to it or something like that.”

Body Scaffold II (Rest), 2015. Presented at Firstdraft, NSW. Photo: Kalanjay Dhir

LW: “It sounds like you’re very invested in the making of these set‑ups…”

EC: “The structures. Yeah, I became interested in dance and then in choreography. I was already making smaller sculptures and structures without any performative element. Then, I started to get obsessed with movement and looking at the way the body moves and looking at habitual movement.

I was building a structure, and then, I had this realization: ‘Oh, I’m doing this without actually having to think.’ When I started working with the steel, it was actually really tough. I found it very difficult, and I had to think. It took me a long time, as well, to build things. But when I was building this particular structure, it only took me 30 minutes or something when it used to take me two hours. Suddenly, I thought, ‘I’m dancing. This is choreography.’ I felt like I found a secret language of dance, of choreography and the way the body moves. That’s what propelled me into looking at choreography with these structures.”

LW: “Have you been working with these structures for a few years now? Several years?”

EC: “I think it’s been since 2014. Upcoming to four years, yeah.”

LW: “That’s fantastic it still feels productive to be using these structures and changing them.”

EC: “Yeah, definitely. I’ve fallen in love with steel. I see it as a metaphor within all of my works. I’m obsessed with having equilibrium—having two opposing things and then making it whole. I always find that the performative side of me is very fluid and loose and kind of all over the place. Then, I see my structures as stability, weight, strength, grounding—a skeleton structure that holds me in a way.”

Biscuit Betrayal, 2018. A performance by Ivan Cheng, with Hyun Lee and Eugene Choi. Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre for REAL REAL. Photo: Rafaela Pandolfini

LW: “I could see how the steel pipes would be the opposite of the body in a lot of ways. Could you tell me more about the performance that you did recently?”

EC: “This was me as a performer for another artist, Ivan Cheng, at Campbelltown Art Center. It’s an hour away from the city. It was launching a new program called Real Real, curated by Jess Olivieri.

The whole program is a collaboration, making a performance and having a two‑week development. Then to livestream the work rather than to bring an audience. This work was made just for the camera.

It was for Ivan Cheng. He’s an artist based in Amsterdam but he’s originally from Sydney. That’s how I know him. This was probably the fifth time I collaborated with him. We’ve got quite a great friendship/working relationship. Hyun Lee was also collaborating with us and she is a film director and as a photographer. She was doing the camera work, and doing the grading, that kind of thing. I was performing, and Ivan basically was writing, and also thought about choreography and movement and the whole thing really: costume, everything.

I struggle to explain this work. The way Ivan works is very interesting. He usually gets performers to perform as him. We’re just basically these bodies that are projecting what Ivan has to say.

He usually pre-records himself speaking. We’re wearing in‑ears during the performance and then just relaying what we’re hearing. It requires a lot of focus. It’s quite hard actually, but that was what we were working on. It was called Biscuit Betrayal.”

[laughter]

Biscuit Betrayal, 2018. A performance by Ivan Cheng, with Hyun Lee and Eugene Choi. Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre for REAL REAL. Photo: Rafaela Pandolfini

LW: “I wonder what challenges there are for you to slip from your role as the artist-director person to a performer in somebody else’s performance. Do such experiences inspire your own practice?”

EC: “Definitely. I think I get most of my inspiration by working with others and for others. I’ve had the privilege of working with so many amazing choreographers and artists, like Xavier Le Roy. He works a lot with Tino Sehgal, and I’ve worked with Tino before. I’ve done a Marina Abramovic thing before.

I find that I learned a lot by doing, and also by experiencing these kinds of developments where you’re with a group of people or you’re with the artists. You’re just there together and you’re learning something or you’re trying to discover something.

I don’t know how to explain it. You’re just experiencing each other and experiencing the same thing. I feel that I learned a lot from that. That also inspires me. I feel that I learn a lot but then I teach others, and then they teach others and then I learn from them. It’s like this continual space of just learning and giving, giving and receiving, which is really beautiful.

I find that that informs a lot of my performative practice. I really don’t think I’d be making the work that I do if I didn’t delve into performing for others and with others.”

LW: “Your own artistic practice and acting as a performer—these are kind of parallel artistic tracks that have formed each other?”

EC: “Yes, definitely. I think so.”

Biscuit Betrayal, 2018. A performance by Ivan Cheng, with Hyun Lee and Eugene Choi. Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre for REAL REAL. Photo: Rafaela Pandolfini

LW: “Are there specific influences or people you are thinking about that are really relevant to you in this moment?”

EC: “In this moment, yes. I really feel like I’m quite inspired by some of the artists around me at the moment in Sydney. I think my peers who are performing as well, and seeing the work that they’re making, that’s inspiring me a lot. Even just working with Ivan at Campbelltown and having that experience with him again. That’s given me a big boost and it’s so refreshing for me.”

LW: “Do you tend to look at other performance‑based practices, or do you ever look at a painter, or a photographer, or something outside of performance?”

EC: “I usually look at other performers and performance practices. I look a lot at sculptures. Artists that are working with objects.”

My mother only speaks Shanghainese when she talks to her brother on the phone (these plants are a gift for her), 2017. Presented at COMA Gallery, NSW & soon at ACE Open, ACT. Photo: Andrew Butler

LW: “Did you always want to be an artist?”

EC: “I actually used to want to be a musician. I used to want to be a singer and I played keys, and I used to want to go to music school. I used to paint and draw when I was in high school, but it was never satisfying. I was always very frustrated with myself and very confused as to how to just make art.

I studied art in high school and a few of my friends, they were wanting to continue with art. They were super confident and they would have their group. I was feeling very lost and flustered over it. Then I went through a bit of a dark period after high school, after finishing. I actually didn’t go on to study…I just had a gap year. That made me feel quite down because everyone in my year went on to study at college or Uni.

It was my dad who encouraged me. He was just like, ‘Why don’t you just go to art school?’ because he had a friend who was studying there. She was doing her master’s and she said that this art school was really great. So I made my portfolio in a month and then I applied. I got an interview, and I got through.

At this point I don’t think I considered myself as an artist. I think I only started to consider myself as one when I found the language that I can so easily speak through art, and that was through performing. I think that actually came in first year at Uni, and so it was actually quite early on in my undergraduate degree.”

LW: “Was it through a class or just being exposed to it?”

EC: “It was through a class, yeah. When I applied, I put down the Painting Studio. It was in my interview, with my portfolio of paintings, and portfolio of photographs and drawings. One of the people who were interviewing me, they questioned why I put painting as my first preference.

I was very baffled by that question because I was like, ‘Um, it’s just what I do.’ They were like, ‘I think you should maybe consider the Sculpture, Performance and Installation Studio.’ Something in me was like, ‘Oh I really trust them.’ Like, I feel like they would know. I actually started in that studio: the Sculpture, Performance and Installation Studio. The first project I did was a performance. I had never done a performance in my life; I wasn’t really that aware of performance art. Soon I delved into it. Making that first project, that was the first time I felt this kind of satisfaction or I felt this deep joy making art. That totally changed everything.”

SOLO PAUSES (amitié dans deux mondes), 2017. Presented at the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, NSW, & WHO SPEAKS FOR A COMMUNITY? Sister Gallery, ACT. Photo: Christopher Arblaster

LW: “That’s fantastic. As a performance artist, maybe your answer to this question will be a little different to some others. What’s an ideal day in the studio? Do you have a studio‑based practice?”

EC: “Yes. I do. What I’ve been doing since coming to this studio…before this studio I was in another studio, but it was a really small shared space where there were desks. There wasn’t much room to move around. I really only wrote emails and stuff like that, or read or did research.

I like to work with loud music. I always put on some music. Since coming here, usually the first thing I do, I like to just get my body warm, and so I do stretching. Stretching to loud music is always so nice. People may say that that’s not a good combination, but I’m very used to it. I just like finding my pleasure points and making my body feel good and stretched out.

Usually I sit down and I make a game plan. I’m like, ‘What am I gonna do today? I’m gonna write this application.’ Or I’m feeling like, ‘Oh, today I’m just gonna make something with the structure, with the steel that I have.’

I walk around and pace around a lot in the studio. I used to do that a lot at Uni when I had a larger studio, and I’ve started doing that again. I think it’s just when I have space, I just like to move around and just constantly move. I like to clean the studio. I sing a lot, as well.”

LW: “I wonder when you’re preparing for a performance, whether that’s going to be recorded or live, is every movement scripted out? Do you know exactly what you’re going to do, or do you leave a lot of openness?”

EC: “It’s definitely very open. I would say that most of my performances are completely improvised. There’s always a guideline. I always know what I want to achieve, but then as soon as I turn that record button on, it just happens.

All I know is at one point in this time, you’re going to put your arm there, but I don’t know how I’m going to get there. I don’t know when I’m going to get there, but I’ll eventually get there. I really trust my body.”

LW: “I was going to say, it sounds like you trust yourself a lot.”

EC: “I think so. I never realized that but I think that I do, or I trust that something will happen. I trust in the work, maybe? I feel like a lot more happens when there’s room for that. I also trust in whatever happens, that it’s meant to be, that’s meant to be the work.”

​​Fortis (Small Death III), 2016. Presented at Seventh Gallery, VIC. Photo: Aaron Hoffman

LW: “You’re in Sydney, a fairly large city.”

EC: “Yes, a fairly large city, and apparently it has been voted the most expensive city in the world now.”

LW: “That’s terrible.”

EC: “It’s terrifying. I saw this list, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, like, it’s more expensive than London…’ ”

LW: “OK. You are in a fairly large city where it’s very expensive…”

EC: “Oh god!”

LW: “…but there’s a thriving art scene and chances to see art and talk with artists and have a community. So, good and bad. But then there’s also being in a smaller place, a quieter place, where maybe you can focus on making. The question is: do you think it’s more important for an artist to be in a bigger place like a Sydney, or maybe to get a little more removed from that?”

EC: “Oh gosh. I think that there just needs to be a balance. A lot of artists find that very hard and frustrating. I find that staying in a larger city where there’s a lot happening gets me moving and it keeps me motivated to just do. Maybe it does get a little bit stressful and then you think the moment you have some down time, you feel guilty and that’s so ridiculous. I find that I definitely do need time away and time alone. Quiet time, even just to focus on my mental health, and to give myself time to just relax and to catch up. For my body to catch up with my mind, for my mind to catch up with my body. Even on the emotional level, to just find that peace within the busy, busy time.”

LW: “I just have a final question for you, what’s next?”

EC: “I’ve actually got a few things lined up—a lot of performance. I’ve got a small performance that I’m doing for a friend. They’re having a show and they just invited three other performers to perform in particular songs on every Saturday, for a month. They’ve provided us with a track and then we interpret it the way that we want to. That’s the next thing that’s coming up. I think it’s quite sweet. It’s just under 20 minutes, a very nice low‑key kind of vibe.

The next thing, I go straight in for this heavy period of rehearsals in April, which is next month. It’s for a larger performance that will be presented at Next Wave festival in Melbourne, and that’s with a cast. There are five performers and there are also lines that we have to learn, like an experimental theater vibe. I’ve never done anything like that before, so that looks very interesting. It’s really been amazing working with actors. I’ve worked with dancers and other performance artists and performers, but never actors. That’s in May, but in May I will be showing an old video installation in a group show in Adelaide.

After that, there are some small, low‑key performances that are looking at documentation and how performance is documented. They’re very far away at the moment, so I haven’t given them much thought, but they’re there. I’m looking forward to actually making performance again, because I feel like I went through quite a long stint of just performing for others. Now I’m ready to make performances again for myself.”

LW: “That’s amazing. It sounds like a busy couple months coming up.”

EC: “Yeah, it feels busy. It looks busy in the calendar. I’m very grateful and thankful. I think having the studio space here is definitely going to help me.”

LW: “Thank you for your time. It was a pleasure speaking with you.”

EC: “Of course. Thank you.”

Phone Tag: Interview with JD Reforma

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Installation view, Coconut Republic, 2017, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

I speak with the Sydney-based artist JD Reforma about Kardashians, car parts, the American landscape, and, of course, art in this Phone Tag interview. Former Phone Tag participant Giselle Stanborough knows JD through art school and connected us for this interview. JD earned an MFA from the University of New South Wales. He often considers contemporary culture in his work, from celebrities and pop to geopolitics and imperialism, as well as his own background as an Australian born to first-generation Filipino immigrants in the suburbs of Sydney. In addition to an interdisciplinary artistic practice, JD is a writer and curator, and he currently works for the Sydney Biennale.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

LW: “If you had to briefly describe your practice, what would you say you make?”

JR: “I make a bit of everything…It is usually informed by whatever kind of idea I’m exploring. Ideally sculpture and installation. Lately a lot of video—just because the economy of it is so much more accessible to me now. I particularly like video, because I can communicate a range of interests aesthetically—subject, narrative—more so than you necessarily could in sculpture and installation. There’s an economy in it: it’s easy to produce, easy to scale, and I quite like playing with the different textures of video, like the cinematic or pastiche and collage or text. It’s a really plastic medium. But, definitely through art school and some time after, I was playing with sculpture and installation and had a very material practice.”

“The work I make is informed by a lot of ideas, but it inhabits a space of pop cultural critique, and embrace as well. I lived for a great deal of time in the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s an interesting community because it inhabits the space of the ‘Aussie battler’—of an aspirational middle class. That fed really well into my practice. I lived in a gated community. I was really interested in aspirational aesthetics, but have kind of moved away from that now.”

LW: “Looking online at work on your website I can see that, but I also see a kind of global geopolitics writ large. Is that fair?”

JR: “Yeah…. The political through the domestic.”

Nothing comes between (foreground), 2017, reconfigured Calvin Klein underwear, marble; and oK ok OK (background), 2017, site-specific computer-cut vinyl, altered Calvin Klein logos, installation view, Coconut Republic, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “What are you working on now?”

JR: “Right now I’m trying to think of a work on television. So I work—and, the way that Sydney is structured, a lot of practices are centered—around opportunities. I don’t have a studio-based practice. I work full-time, which makes it hard to have that. So you get an opportunity, you make a work. I have a show toward the end of the year…and you know when you have a show and you have an idea for a work, and you’re just trying to get them to meet in the middle somewhere? The show is around television, and the curator is great. I don’t even own a television. It’s a bit anachronistic to think of an idea for television. But I’ve really wanted to make this work for ages and ages and ages and ages about Kylie Jenner.”

“I’m taking a break mostly. I recently had an exhibition in a gallery in the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s a particularly interesting space because it’s located in this post-industrial context. There is a highway called the Princes Highway that skirts Sydney down the south coast and goes all the way through the southwestern suburbs. It’s called that because the Prince of Wales visited Australia in the 1920s. This roadway already existed and because of his visit they renamed the existing highway the Princes Highway. I never knew that backstory. Everyone knows the Princes Highway. It’s very post-industrial, geared towards car sales, car repairs, rims, supercenters—there’s an Ikea there. It’s very dreary, very neglected. There’s this one place along the Princes Highway—Tempe Tyres. It has this incredible façade where it’s just two or three stories of glass frontage built with a grid of chrome wheels.”

LW: “Oh my god.”

JR: “It’s amazing. It’s beautiful actually. It’s a perfect grid. Years and years ago it used to move. All the wheels used to move at different speeds. It’s kind of a perfect analogy of the highway itself. All these little wheels moving at different speeds and then, over time, it has completely fallen apart. They stopped getting the wheels to move because they started breaking down, they started falling out. So they haven’t replaced the wheels.”

“Everyone in Sydney knows Tempe Tyres. Particularly anyone who is from the west knows Tempe Tyres. So I took a 16:9 shot of Tempe Tyres with the road reflected in it. That was nice for me. I don’t actually do my video work; I work with collaborators in that sense. I asked a good friend of mine, Kate Blackmore, who’s also an artist, to film with me at Tempe Tyres and we sat there, trying to take video. And the guys were coming out asking us what we were doing. We were like, ‘Oh it’s an art project. Do you mind if we take a few photos and videos?’ and they were so happy for us to do it. To me, chrome is an analogy for suburban masculinity and, particularly around that area, there’s a lot of marginalized communities for whom signaling status and wealth happens through objects and hotted out cars. I was interested in making that a tribute to them in a sense.”

“Like I said at the beginning, I have a very plastic practice. I try to mold it to the context. [This work] was so specific for that particular gallery. In a way I kind of wanted it to feel as if it had always been there.”

Installation shot, Princes Highway, 2017, 55 Sydenham Road, Sydney. Photo: Stelios Papadaki

LW: “The work you showed in the space was as video?”

JR: “It was a video. Not quite 1:1 scale of the actual Tempe Tyres, but almost. I try to match ideas to contexts.”

LW: “Just judging from a few recent projects on your website, it’s not like you install a set of objects in a room; it’s really a whole room all working together as an environment.”

JR: “Yeah, an immersive environment is something I am interested in.”

LW: “So when you’re thinking about the show you have coming up, you have this idea and you know you have this physical space—you even know what it looks like. I wonder how that affects the process, and I wonder how that affects the process with the curator, because they aren’t just coming in and picking out objects and putting them in a room.”

JR: “No, no, I wish they could. It would be so much easier. [Laughs] It’s a very interesting gallery [for this next show]. It has a kind of a pentagonal shape. It houses this huge archive of Australian television and radio. I’m not so interested in making a work about Australian television and broadcast, more about the texture of television. They way that television is consumed today, which for me, largely, is through my phone, through the internet, and how sort of I grew up watching television as a part of my schedule, like when I came home from school. It’s part of your routine. Which it still is, but now, rather than it taking up a section of my day, television and the televisual run parallel, with that you consume it in 15-second grabs, or 1-minute-long grabs, rather than episodically.”

“I know it is broad to say I want to make a work about Kylie Jenner, but I quite like the Kardashians. I like them as the characters of the show but also the way in which they inhabit this kind of televisual space. They are characters but they are also family members. They have multiple shows running concurrent to each other; they have these apps which are running on another, entirely different time scale to their television shows. They also have the media landscape, which they’re feeding into, so it becomes this feedback loop. And they are broadcasting themselves through their own television space, through their social media. So it is this huge, huge, incredibly complex feedback loop which is so tightly controlled by them. It’s not so much about the Kardashians as a media empire, but more of them as these time lords in a way.”

“Now with their makeup lines, particularly Kylie Jenner’s which started and now Kim Kardashian’s, I’m thinking of them as artists, because they are working with these palettes and working with color. Anytime I’m exploring an idea, I’m also trying to think, why does this need to be considered through art? And you know the lip kits are kind of what started it. Anyone can enjoy the Kardashians or any of these reality television shows independent of contemporary art. But now that they are exploring this makeup, it kind of enters this realm of body politics and the relationship between the consumer and the body, and women and the body and color and the screen, with branding and politics.”

A Novel Merchant (performance documentation), 2015, performed as part of 48 HR Incident, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “So, Kardashians, other artists… this question is meant to be very open—who has influenced your practice?”

JR: “I’m probably more influenced by film directors, or maybe just a whole range. Film directors and photographers, Bruce Webber, Herb Writ. Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein. Paul Thomas Anderson, I love his films. Stephen Spielberg. Roni Horn, I love her work. Felix Gonzalez Torres. I love his work.”

“Who has influenced me though? I think a lot of American creatives and producers. I think it comes through in my work, that American film sense—in particular the two last works that I made, thinking about how Philippines is still so connected and filtered through an American lens. They even learn American English, and how that, alongside the way Australian culture is learned through and influenced by American culture. Even the language of comedy that I know is American comedy. So, I think that’s why a lot of my influences are American, probably mostly American vogue though.”

LW: “I though in Australia there would be a strong British influence—British humor, British whatever…”

JR: “There is quite a lot, but I never engaged too much with Ab Fab or—what’s that other one that everyone always references, it’s got John Cleese in it…”

LW: “Monty Python?”

JR: “Yeah, Monty Python, or Little Britain. I don’t watch much of that or engage in it. I don’t know why. They’re not the cultural references that were for me growing up. My dad loved Elvis and John Wayne, and my mom was obsessed with beauty pageants.”

Confidently Beautiful, with a heart, 2017, video installation, with site-specific wall-painting and computer cut adhesive vinyl, video duration 8 minutes, installation view, Halò, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “Sometimes I feel like we just stay our whole lives the way that we were when we were five. We keep so many of those same characteristics.”

JR: “I totally agree. I don’t know how many times I’ve been at an event or party and people are making these British references, and in my mind, I’m thinking ‘I really need to watch Monty Python.’ Yeah, very American, I don’t know why. Maybe because of the cultural influences my parents consumed. Also, I think I was interested in nationalism and this idea of American pride. It feels so much more acceptable than Australian pride. Australian pride is connected so much more to British colonial rule, and also thus to our kind of colonial history, this colonial legacy. You would never see in the pages of an Australian magazine Kylie Minogue draped in an Aussie flag. That’s just an image you would never see. I think there’s more of a shame celebrating something like that for us.”

LW: “There certainly is a good deal of patriotism here. Have you ever been to the U.S.?”

JR: “Yeah. Last time I was there was ages ago, in 2012.”

LW: “Did it live up to these ideas of America?”

JR: “I saw so many more U.S. flags out on balconies. Definitely I did. The size of it. America’s bigness impresses itself strongly on any visitor. And also, it looks like a film set. I remember when my cousin and I went to Las Vegas, we went to the Grand Canyon, and it is just enormous. It looks like—because it’s so big—it looks exactly how it is drawn in Road Runner. That’s the far away wall that’s been painted, and this is the middle ground, and this is the foreground where you are. Space in America feels very much constructed from a foreground, middleground, and background in that sense. It has that kind of dimensionality. I don’t know if you feel that.”

Confidently Beautiful, with a heart, 2017, video installation, with site-specific wall-painting and computer cut adhesive vinyl, video duration 8 minutes, installation view, Halò, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “I don’t know; I’ll have to think about it. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

JR: “Probably when I was in high school. I think a lot of people start thinking of themselves an anything when they are forced to, which is when you go to university. I thought of myself as an artist then because it was the thing that I excelled at in school. At that age you’re so conditioned to do what you think you’re good at, because it will provide you the greatest advantage, so probably when I started art school is when I started thinking of myself as an artist. But I wish I had started thinking about this a bit later, because maybe I got into the wrong thing.”

“I don’t know if I still think of myself as an artist. No, I don’t. I know that when people ask me what I do, I say: ‘I work at the biennale in Sydney.’ And then I’ll say that I’m an artist. It’s hard to rationalize the latter.”

LW: “Yeah, you mentioned working for the Sydney biennale and also it coming to an end. When it ends, do you become an artist again?”

JR: “I think so. Whenever the shoe fits, I’ll wear it.”

LW: “I think it’s great to have a more flexible identity.”

JR: “Absolutely. And yet there is this cultural impetus to choose one thing or another. More and more, I’ve become less attached to that. I think of myself as someone surviving. [Laughs] And if art helps me survive on this day, then I’m an artist, and if working at the Sydney biennale helps my survival the next day, then I’ll work at the Sydney biennale. It has to be flexible.”

The Source, 2013, 1L spring water bottles, LED lights, custom MDF plinths, installation view, The Source, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photography: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “So, my next question is, what is an ideal day in the studio? But if that doesn’t fit, what is an ideal day making?”

JR: “My studio is on my phone. I keep folders of references. The thing I do with making—it sounds so tacky—but I guess what I do is create mood boards in a way.”

LW: “But you do it all on your phone?”

JR: “Lately I do, the past few years. Not because I wanted to but because I don’t have a studio. I haven’t had a studio since 2015. I’ve become really good at organizing ideas into lists, folders of images, bookmarks of links to articles or texts that I’m reading. I don’t want to say that an ideal day is on my phone, but it is on my phone, kind of across the bunch of things I’m reading. I haven’t read a book in so long. I read mainly on my phone. That’s not true; I read a real book last year, How to Train Your Virgin, one of those Badlands books. But that was because it was like 100 pages long and I read it in like 3 hours by the pool. I like the phone as a studio because it’s much more like a rhizomatic studio, to go from here to here and there to there.”

“And once that process is done, I’m up on my feet a lot. Going to the hardware store and looking at materials; going to that store and looking at materials. Going to a fabric store, looking at materials; going to a department store to buy Ralph Lauren bed sheets for material. I try to structure my studio around my day. I take a lot of photos. I think it would change if I had a studio. There would be things on the walls, and I’d collect a lot more material. Collect a lot more paper material. For now, this works.”

The Source, 2013, 1L spring water bottles, LED lights, custom MDF plinths, installation view, The Source, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photography: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “My last question is whether it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, like a Sydney, and you know it’s expensive and there’s a lot going on and institutions. Or, on the other hand, to be in a more remote, smaller place where you can focus on making.”

JR: “I actually think I was much more productive when I didn’t live in the city. When I was living at home, it was about a two-hour commute. I think I was productive in order to fill that time in which I didn’t feel productive, which is when I was commuting. There’s definitely benefits to both. The seclusion, that feeling of alienation, can be really rich and nourishing as an artist. I feel like a nut saying that.”

“In the city, obviously, you have access to institutions; to go see, interact; you have community. I think definitely if we’re talking about practicality as an artist, it is probably easier to live in a big city because there’s just so much with networks and feedback that we have understood to be critical to an artist’s practice. But I don’t think that you can’t be an artist in the regions or in the suburbs. In Australia, there’s actually a lot of support for artists outside the center. In a sense there’s a lot of institutional and government support, but in a way it still feels like supporting marginalized artists is a way of feeding the center. When I lived in Ingleburn, which is where my parents are living, I got a lot of support from institutions giving me shows and whatever, but there wasn’t necessarily an attempt to create that kind of a community out there. But having said that, there has been much more of an effort to create centers in Western Sydney that stay in Western Sydney, which is nice. But I guess, the answer would be both.”

LW: “Totally. Thank you.”

JR: “You’re welcome.”