Rosa Barba has a way of taking our world’s most magical and most fundamental elements, then folding them in on one another—taking them apart, making them anew. Since the 1990s, she has been remaking film into sculpture and astronomy into film, fascinated by how each of these things scramble time and space. For her latest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she upped the ante, turning a black box gallery into a cello. Long wires stretch from floor to ceiling as film projectors pull strips of celluloid across them. Scotch tape that holds together these splices plucks the wires while passing over them, making low sounds, a celluloid symphony.

The exhibition, “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” is an unusual survey of 15 years of Barba’s work: over a dozen cinematic sculptures are displayed in one a room, arranged so that they almost become one installation. Central to the show is Barba’s latest 25-minute film, Charge (2025), co-commissioned by MoMA and the Vega Foundation. The film was shotat CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, and will be screened at Moynihan Train Hall and in Times Square, where the work is being shown as part of the “Midnight Moment” program throughout July.

At MoMA, the film builds to a crescendo of experimental music that is elegantly complemented by the mechanical clicks of various analog apparatuses Barba has used to make sculptures. Charge shows the sun through a telescope and a vast array of reflective solar panels in the Mojave Desert. Eventually, the screen cuts to white, illuminating the sculptures in MoMA’s black box. Here rigorous studies of light, whether solar or artificial, create a feeling of wonder. In a time of slick screens and black boxes, Barba’s mechanical tinkering feels refreshing, even urgent—a reminder that we have the agency to take things apart and put them back together anew.

You’re committed to analog film at a time when that’s kind of anachronistic. This is clearly about a lot more than just nostalgia. You mentioned in a conversation with Joan Jonas for Bomb that you couldn’t make your work using video.

It was never about nostalgia. Early on, I started to fragment the cinematic apparatus, partly as a way to go against immersion, trying to leave the viewer alert and activated, and in this mode of mentally changing gears. Mechanics are important for this kind of work.

There are many other reasons. I realized right away with my first film, Panzano(1990), that using an analog film camera really defined my work. It makes the process performative: you have to be very precise in how you deal with the limitations of the material and of time. Also, the object of the film projector has quite a presence in the room. Often, I work with non-actors, and I find that the big presence and loud sound of the film camera gives people a clear way of understanding they are being filmed, which makes them change gears and be who they want to be in front of the camera. That feels respectful, to me, and helps me get around some of the problems that come with filming people and voyeurism.

Even if I’m not filming people but rather the landscape, there is a kind of alchemy that comes from holding the camera, which has a certain weight that requires me to use my whole body. Questions like “how long can I hold a sequence?” start to define the length and the time of certain scenes. Increasingly, I have also been responding to various architectures, dismantling cinematic elements until they become sculptural, engaging the materiality of the machine.

Your work is thoroughly researched and often takes on scientific subjects, but it’s never didactic. It clearly resists telling people what to think and embraces mystery and unknowability. Often, it ends up being quite elegant. What role does beauty play for you?

My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic—like with my film Bending to Earth (2015), which shows a uranium field. But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line. I’m also interested in the unstableness of knowledge, and in what we as human beings want when we try to reach beyond knowledge, and in how we want to inscribe ourselves.

It’s often beauty and enigma that get many people interested in studying things like astronomy. But many of the scientific formats like diagramming have this way of removing the mystery, whereas you retain the magic. You’ve long had an interest in the ways both astronomy and cinema can collapse space and time. That becomes almost meta in this exhibition, where you’re collapsing around 15 years of work until it almost becomes one installation. Where did that idea come from?

I’ve been working with this idea of creating a conference or dialogue between works for some time. When I was invited to curate an exhibition with works from the Reina Sofía collection in 2010, I showed different pieces switching on and off at different times. Before that, at the Venice Biennale in 2009, I made an installation called Coro Spezzato: The Future Lasts One Day, where different projectors were synchronized and the voices would turn off and respond to each other. But it was at the Neue Nationalgalerie [in Berlin] in 2021 that I really took off with this idea.

At MoMA, I wanted to focus on sound pieces and sculptural works that connect to the ideas in the main film, Charge. As I got to know the space, I became very attracted by its floor-to-ceiling window. Whenever I work with architectures, I look for kinds of membranes to bring the inside out and the outside in. I did that here on both sides of the space; if you look up to or down from the fifth floor on the ledge, the exhibition there spills in and out. I wanted to understand the space as an experimental laboratory and deal conceptually with the idea of the light—with having the space transform from morning until evening. In the beginning of the day, the sculptures are more prominent, but over the hours, the film gets brighter; there is no hierarchy as to which works are more dominant. I started understanding the whole space, with its incredible height, as an instrument. I tested the wire pieces for a long time in my studio, but had to retune them to the space as the whole gallery became a kind of cello body.

There are three-and-a-half minutes in the film where you just hear the sounds of the wire pieces becoming louder, the scotch tape plucking the wires pizzicato. The scotch tape returns in this kind of prismatic circular sculpture that is also based on an early experiment about how to make our colors visible for our eyes. 

You’re always combining film and sculpture, and here, the installation itself becomes kind of time-based. Tell us more about the new film.

As in all my films, I was interested in how we as human beings inscribe ourselves: in how we want to reach beyond, in how we want to understand more about the universe. There’s so much that we don’t know about. I wanted to explore light in this vein, continuing my work on the overlap of astronomy and cinema, and taking it further, to the physics laboratory. I had this relationship [as an artist-in-residence] with CERN already; a few years ago, I filmed their cloud chamber and these collusions of light that they produce. Then I learned of this incredible radio astronomy lab[Nançay Radio Observatory] in the middle of France, on a piece of land was bought in the 1950s and kept free of all kinds of disturbances, so that scientist could just collect radio waves and gather knowledge. Light is used there to translate it all into code: in the middle of the film, a lens moves at the speed of the earth and reinforces the faint signs of radio waves. I’m interested in the space that is all around us, and its many dimensions and layers.

I filmed some experiments, one after the other, each introducing a different light source. The process was kind of alchemical: I was filming with a 16mm camera, having the light inscribed on material. I was able to capture things that were not visible with the more standard digital recording of the experiment—which was pretty exciting.

Tell us about the performance, too.

I’ve been developing this shutter system that reacts to drums for 9 years now: shutters open up in response to different frequencies. Recently I started working with a choir, because I’m also interested in how every human has a different scale of frequencies, and in how all these different frequencies produce different kinds of cinema. This is my first time working with one vocalist, Alicia Hall Moran, and one percussionist, Chad Taylor. I’m on the cello. I play the cello with the film projector, pressing the cello against a film that is running, and meanwhile the wire piece plays, too.

You can catch Barba’s performances at MoMA June 26–29.

In her cartoonish yet sophisticated paintings of people, Louise Bonnet toes lots of lines—between familiarity and misrecognition, seduction and ick. Speaking of toes, she is especially skilled at painting big ones, those underappreciated appendages that allow us to stand upright and thus, according to Georges Bataille, be human. Pisser Triptych (2021), which featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, boasts an overlapping set of feet painted in incongruous scale, as if belonging to different humanoid species: a small set of big toes are jammed into a fleshy, larger pair. In Kneeling Sphinx 2 (2021), clenched, extra–long toes indent a squatting woman’s rump.

Bonnet’s paintings feel true to life, though not because they are rendered with accuracy. Rather, her strategic exaggerations deftly capture the ways that bodies are sites of both pleasure and discomfort, how they can disgust and also delight, can feel alien yet also like home. Acknowledging all of that simultaneously is what makes her work refreshing and rare.

The Los Angeles–based Bonnet takes on the female nude—art history’s favorite subject, and feminism’s most debated—and transports her to a fantasy world, where she is blissfully free from both moralizing and misogynist ideas of how she “should” be. Her body is her own—often appearing to burst out of the canvas’s rectangular confines, her flab and rolls shiny and supple—but this doesn’t always mean her corporeal experience is pleasant. Itchy awkwardness is palpable; mysterious bodily fluids abound.

To discuss Bonnet’s latest work, we met up ahead of the opening of her two-person exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, a duo show with Elizabeth King titled “De Anima” that focuses on a shared affinity in both artists’ approaches to figuration, centered simultaneously on objecthood and liveliness. Complementing Bonnet’s cartoons are King’s uncanny wooden dolls. The two had been working in dialogue for a year or so, but after the LA fires in January, Bonnet felt compelled to begin her work for “De Anima” anew. Meanwhile, SITE Santa Fe International commissioned the artist to create a new series for the next edition of the biennial, opening in June. We discussed both bodies of new work below.

Emily Watlington: The first thing I noticed in your paintings at the Swiss Institute is that they are closer crops; in previous work you often showed the full figure, but here you are focused specific body parts.

Louse Bonnet: I really wanted to emphasize gestures that are routine but that we might not be totally aware of, or see ourselves doing. One is called Shoelace, another is Bra (all works 2025); they show people tying and fastening, but the garments have been removed. I imagined explaining these movements as if to an AI or an alien—or even to a man or someone who doesn’t wear bras! I was also reading about British spies who, during World War II, learned various gestures so that they might pass as French. They would parachute in, then hide their parachute really fast, and then walk down the road as if they were French. They’d eat garlic chocolate so that they would smell French. They re-sewed their buttons in the French style rather than the British. They never put their hands in their pockets.

I also painted walls and screens and doors in order to emphasize that you are seeing something intimate, peeking in. I’m always thinking about movies, and with this work I kept picturing a scene in Rosemary’s Baby—which I’ve seen a thousand times—where she’s on the phone sitting on the bed, and it’s shot from behind the door, so that she’s hidden.

EW: You have a way of mashing together pop cultural references and art historical ones rather seamlessly—and yet there is a productive awkwardness to the amalgamation, too. I know your background is in graphic design. What got you interested in the more painterly, art historical realm?

LB: I’ve always been interested, but I guess I got better at being able to paint. All the plants in these paintings come from the Garden of Eden, like figs and lilies. It’s more an art history version of the Bible than it is about following the text. Like Adam and Eve, the figures in my paintings are naked; their garments are missing.

EW: Naked and without shame—that makes sense, because to me, your paintings take on the female nude and bodily grossness while avoiding shame or moralizing. I’m curious about the proportions, like the huge foot in Shoelace and the tiny foot in Shoe.

LB: I wanted to try making the shape kind of abstract, especially with Shoe. I also worked from pictures for these paintings, which I never do. I noticed I was starting to basically copy the picture, and I wanted to fight that.

EW: The heavy top figure with the small foot really captures the feeling of wearing heels and wondering if you’ll topple over. You’ve talked before about being drawn to the unidealized proportions of Manet’s Olympia.

LB: Yes, they’re why I think that painting is so great: something’s wrong in it. Another painting [of mine] is called Zipper, and I was hoping that you might recognize the gesture maybe not with your eyes but with your body or muscle memory—like when you see someone scratching and you want to scratch. Bodies know things.

EW: Your paintings are always of women, or else ambiguous.

LB. I think of it really as painting myself. I don’t know how it is for other people, but I’m not always looking at myself and thinking “woman.” Still, I don’t have a penis, so I don’t know how to paint from that experience. I can only speak to what I feel.

EW: That makes sense: you’re more interested in embodied experience than in women or identity. The female nude has a lot of art historical baggage, which you seem to joyfully disregard.

LB: In the end, if the work is “about” women, it’s not because I’m making a statement. Any social agenda that comes through is an accident. And I’m glad to not to be thinking about what I “should” do in my work. Instead I am interested in thinking about the sometimes arbitrary things we consider acceptable to show and not to show. I was reading a manual for manners from a few centuries ago that said you can blow your nose in your hand, but only if you don’t look at it.

EW: That reminds me of what Julia Kristeva says about the abject—that things are not inherently abject, but they become so when they are out of place. Hair, for instance, can be lovely when attached to someone’s head, but is considered gross once detached. You’ve talked before about being drawn to things as a kid or teen and not knowing they were “wrong,” like R. Crumb.

LB: To me, that worked seemed very inventive and like such good ideas. You could see that people had so much fun making them. You could feel the joy, even in the horrible things. I’m sure the message still infiltrated and did some damage, but that energy was important to me.

EW: Fun and joy really comes through in your work. You seem to mash together paintings and cartoons, humor and the grotesque. How do you balance it all, or does it just come naturally?

LB: It does, but it helps that I didn’t go to art school or learn the “rules” of painting. I didn’t have parents who ever said, “No, you can’t do this” or “No, that’s not how you do that.” I never even once heard my mother complain that anyone was fat or ugly. We went to nudist camps every summer. I didn’t grow up with any sense of what I was “supposed” to do. That means I have technical problems—I was repainting stuff this morning!—but I don’t feel the weight of art history judging me. Instead I just start with a feeling, which means there are probably 10 paintings behind the final one. I have to make the painting to see that I don’t like it, then I build from there. I’ll make a sketch, mostly to see the proportions, but it almost never really ends up like the sketch.

EW: What are you showing in the SITE Santa Fe International in June?

LB: D.H. Lawrence [novelist who figures as a “person of interest” in the exhibition, which is structured like a story] made erotic drawings that will be included. They were banned in England! I am making some small paintings to go with those. While making those, I re-read Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1926) and realized how afflicted he was by the feeling of not being in your body. The British were so anti-feeling-things.

EW: Which gets us back to the British spies you mentioned earlier. A lot of the skepticism toward figuration has to do with voyeurism—and for good reason. But your work reminds us that spying isn’t always bad: the British were trying to stop the Nazis, after all.

LB: Yes, and it’s important to me that I am never making fun of the figures I am painting. I want to spy on them, but I’m thinking about them, not who’s going to see them and what they will think.

Correction 5/22/2025: A previous version of this interview incorrectly stated that the artist lost her paintings for the exhibition to the fire. Instead, the fires prompted her to start over on the series.

Shana Moulton’s studio at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has chaired the art department since July 2024, is painted a saturated pastel green—a shade that is, in the artist’s words, “just good enough a green to green screen with.” The studio doubled as a set for the videos in “Meta/Physical Therapy,”Moulton’s exhibition last spring at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which centered around a video installation starring Moulton’s semi-autobiographical alter ego, Cynthia, a middle-aged white hypochondriac with an unfortunate bob and a forlorn look in her eyes. Stepping in to Moulton’s studio is like entering a New Age physical therapy office, with its modular furniture, jewel-toned gadgets, and eccentric array of objects easily at home in a roadside crystal shop or megamall gadget store.

Moulton’s objects are more than props. They “take on a life of their own,” she told Art21 in 2014. Her breakthrough video series “Whispering Pines”(2002–18), a 10-part lo-fi monodrama that screened in the artist’s retrospective last fall at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, introduced Cynthia as she attempts to self-soothe by coveting product after product, from a miniature fountain to an Avon reflexology glove. The objects in Cynthia’s home are animated in an Adobe After Effects fever dream, collapsing her digital and analog worlds. Named after the Oakhurst, California, senior citizen mobile home park where Moulton grew up, “Whispering Pines”marries 1980s kitsch and New Age aesthetics. A hemorrhoid pillow sewn into a lilac dress contains a portal to another world, and the art of floral arrangement, set to an instrumental Enya cover, becomes an alchemical act. Twenty years after the birth of Cynthia, Moulton––now middle-aged herself––continues to embody this character to explore products and exercises promising pain relief, most recently in a series of performances created in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett.

On an uncharacteristically rainy Saturday in Santa Barbara this past November, Moulton showed off some of her beloved gadgets, and led me around her favorite buildings on the same Super Handy scooter that Cynthia used to glide around the stage in “Meta/Physical Therapy.” Below, she discusses hypochondria, hospital art, and the absurdity of wellness consumerism.

Zsofi Valyi-Nagy:You have such an incredible collection of objects. Which one is your favorite right now?

Shana Moulton: This Visible Woman toy doll that I got as a 5-year-old. I used this in one of my first performances as an undergrad at Berkeley, in 1998. It comes with organs: You paint them and you put her body together. In that performance, I filled the doll with glittery, rainbow fishing lure worms that my dad used to hide around the house. Then I removed the worms, in a kind of surgery, one by one.

My professor, Kevin Radley, who was such a big influence on me, helped me film it, and we projected a close-up of that over me. That was actually my first projection performance. Much later, I did a performance at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) when I first moved to New York, and I filmed the removal of the actual organs. I projected the sequence over my body and I sang the song from The Last Unicorn, “Now that I’m a woman, everything is strange.”

Do you mind handing me that pyramid [pointing]? I’ve been collecting examples of orgonite, which is based on Dr. Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Orgonite is meant to balance energy or protect you from negative frequencies. It’s made of metal, usually copper, and crystals, suspended in resin. I’m trying to make my own.

ZSVN: What’s your relationship to this energetic shield stuff?

SM: I think there’s always more to what’s going on than we know, or can know. I don’t know how to use crystals, and I haven’t studied them, but I’m sure there’s something to them, and I feel the same with orgonite.

ZSVN: Growing up in California, did you have a lot of exposure to New Age culture?

SM: Sort of. I grew up in the Bible Belt of California, but I started to seek those things out on my own in the public library before there was the internet. When I went to college at Berkeley in the ’90s, that’s when I really encountered it. My roommate was into something that I think was called the Mother Wave, and she met someone who spoke to dolphins (they also claimed to be in the FBI). And of course, we went to Burning Man three times in a row.

ZSVN: Was there an aversion to mysticism in the community where you grew up?

SM: I would say anything outside of Christianity was considered satanic, and there just wasn’t a lot of awareness of other spiritualities. Luckily, my parents were not religious and I wasn’t a part of that. And my dad’s brother was an astrologer.

ZSVN: Is that Chuck Moulton, who did the natal chart in the Bio section of your website?

SM: Yeah, when I was born, he did my chart. He passed away when I was a sophomore in college, after going into a coma. After that, I got to know more about his life as a poet and astrologer through his friends in Fresno.

ZSVN:These spinal decompression devices are so beautiful. What are you planning to use them for?

SM:Whenever I have a budget, it’s also an excuse to buy things that I would use anyway, so I thought these could help my head and neck pain. Not that I’m good about using them.

ZSVN: In your Art21 video, you talk about your hypochondria and about always asking yourself “do I really have this?” That resonated with me, because even though I have a diagnosis, I sometimes still don’t believe it myself. I’ve gaslit myself into thinking that I tricked my doctor into diagnosing me, because the diagnostic process for hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) is so subjective. I’ve had so many experiences of misdiagnosis and medical gaslighting, but the experiences have been generative for my art practice.

SM: Exactly. Someone just asked me, how are you making work with this limitation? But actually, it’s creative fodder. I didn’t really have a choice, I had to make it a part of the work, because it’s a performance, and it’s about the body.

ZSVN:Can I ask where the neck braces came from that Cynthia wears in Whispering Pines? I love how they’re embellished and match her dresses. Did you have to wear the neck brace, or was that just part of the character?

SM: I began my series “Medical Dresses”(2001–02)––dresses with medical devices sewn into them—in grad school. I think the neck braces were gifts, but the walker and blood pressure tester were my grandparents’. The hemorrhoid pillow was a thrift store find. At the time, weirdly, I was thinking about bipedalism, because I studied physical anthropology in college, and how strange and difficult it is for us to be bipedal. I was thinking about whether bipedalism was related to consciousness and about gravity and frailty. I was looking at Rebecca Horn and other artists who were extending the body: Matthew Barney and Hussein Chalayan, the fashion designer who did those great coffee table dresses.

I stopped using those dresses after a few years, because, at a certain point, it felt like it wasn’t my territory. Although the medical devices were things that I was likely to use at some point in my life, I didn’t yet have personal experience with them. I still want to go back to costume and body appendages, especially now that it is becoming personal. I’ve had this sock aid forever––I love its form, which is such a mystery––and now, I could really use it, because with my hip pain, putting on socks and shoes is one of the hardest things for me. And if I do wind up getting a hip replacement, I’ll be wearing this hip abductor pillow that I love. Some of these things that I collected are weirdly becoming relevant.

ZSVN: Do you think growing up in a senior citizen community had an impact on your work?

SM: Part of it was going to the hospital for my uncle and then visiting my grandparents in the hospital as they aged, and when they were ill at home. Growing up in the senior park, I was really paranoid that my parents would get sick because they were slightly older than my classmates’ parents. Back then, my dad was the kind of person who would accidentally cut himself and we’d be like, “Dad, there’s blood all over you!” And he’d be like, “Oh, I didn’t notice!” So maybe my sense of hypochondria comes from my dad thinking I was overreacting. If I got a scrape on my knee, I’d walk around with a limp. I was really careful because I didn’t want to get hurt as a kid. I don’t like pain.

ZSVN: I can relate to that, taking the smallest wounds or symptoms so seriously and recovering from a cold like it’s my job.

SM: I mean, with the internet, it’s such a trip to be able to look up symptoms. It’s terrifying, it’s empowering, it’s self-sabotage in some cases, and it’s anxiety producing.

ZSVN: In Whispering Pines 4 (2007), Cynthia is typing on her desktop computer, logging her symptoms in her diary. But the physical act of looking up carpal tunnel on the internet is exacerbatingher carpal tunnel. It reminded me of spending hours scrolling on my phone for the gadget that’s going to cure my neck pain, and in that time, only making the pain worse. You capture that infinite scroll in “Meta/Physical Therapy” as well—the web browser takes on a life of its own, leaking into the physical realm and washing over Cynthia.

SM: What a pleasure it is to seek out these things that might solve or soothe whatever ails us. I grew up on Harriet Carter and Lillian Vernon catalogs, which were like proto–Sky Mall. I had all the gadgets, including things that you might apply to your body; those were the things I was looking at as a kid. But now it’s endless. There are so many things, and a lot of them are marketed through the algorithm. Now I don’t even have to look for them; they just come to me. I recently got this overpriced gadget called Sensate. It stimulates your vagus nerve in time with meditation music from an app. But of course, to access all the soundscapes, you have to pay $50 a year on top of the $300 gadget. I rationalized the purchase by thinking I would use it in work, but I just use it to relax.

ZSVN: I love how you use arts grants to buy objects that are probably FSA eligible. I always get ads for wellness start-ups, which remind me of the Avon lady/healer in Whispering Pines 4 (2007) and the multilevel marketing scheme that is happening there. What do you make of this subculture that you encountered in the ’90s entering the mainstream?

SM: In college, my roommate spent the money to do Transcendental Meditation (TM), and I remember being skeptical of that at the time. Years later, I finally listened to so much of David Lynch talking about TM that I was like, OK, now I can afford it, so I’m going to try it. I do think meditation is the answer to a lot, but the rigorous 20 minutes twice a day just didn’t work for me. You had to keep buying things that felt Scientology-adjacent, so that eventually turned me off. I do feel like there is lot of snake oil out there.

ZSVN: I’m curious about your relationship to Cynthia. Does it feel different to explore aspects of yourself that you’re maybe a little ashamed of, such as your hypochondriacal tendencies, through
a character?

SM: It does. Some of Cynthia’s experiences were intertwined with issues my mom was having. More recently, they relate to my hip issues and some of the embarrassing aspects of that. It took me a while to get the confidence to ride this scooter around campus. Sometimes I use a cane and I think back to my grandma, who had arthritis and yet would never touch any of these things. I sometimes feel like I’m weaker than her. I think the MoMA piece was maybe a way to process that shame.

I’m also poking fun at my demographic to an extent, and it seems like it’s been gentle enough that people can relate. Humor is such an important strategy for navigating trauma and illness and tragedy.

“Whispering Pines”also came out of poking fun at the art world, at the idea of high and low art. But now it’s a totally different art world.

Cynthia is loosely based on my experience of looking in the mirror and having existential dread, or working on improving myself, and trying to take that all less seriously. But she’s not an everyperson––so many people don’t have the privilege to just think about themselves for hours at a time.

ZSVN: That’s true, but according to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of every four people will experience disability at some point in their life, at least when they age. Your work explores the aesthetics of aging; you find beauty and style in the senior aisle of the drugstore.

SM: I like things that are designed to soothe ill people. I mean, it’s similar to things that are designed for babies, the pastels and the soft biomorphic shapes. Who doesn’t like that?

If a hospital is designed well, I could spend all day there. I love a good hospital. The art they have in hospitals is usually really beautiful to me.

ZSVN: There’s this self-help book that you reference in Whispering Pines 5 (2005) called The Feeling Good Handbook (1989) by David D. Burns, MD. He talks about negative thoughts and their detrimental effects on the body. Cynthia is reading a chapter titled “You can change the way you feel.” I’m fully behind the mind-body connection, but there’s a toxic positivity to this language that makes you wonder if chronic pain and illness are your own fault.

SM: I’ve had that thought so many times. Having made work about something and then gotten the symptoms or the illness that it was connected to, I’m like, “Oh, my God, did I make that happen?”
My mom encountered a lot of that “mind over matter” attitude when she was sick. “Oh, you just have to have a good attitude and think positive,” and “it’s your emotions that have created this.” Or “you just have to eat completely pure food”—to cure stage four cancer. It made me really upset when she got that kind of advice. I do think there are a lot of pollutants in what we eat, but I don’t like this sense of shame that comes with not being perfect.

ZSVN: When I watched the very first video featuring Cynthia, Whispering Pines 1 (2002), as she’s walking into the grocery store in her hemorrhoid pillow dress and examining this can of beans, I identified so much with her feeling of self-pity, but also with her hope that this product might help her feel better. Every time I try something new—a new product or a new method—I’m so optimistic.

SM: Yeah, it’s like a high. You get addicted to that feeling of hope.  

Amalia Ulman broke the internet in 2014 when she started an Instagram account for posting images of her beauty routine. There, she thanked followers for supporting her as she underwent plastic surgery and solicited opinions on her hair color and outfits. It was all a performance, soon titled Excellences and Perfections, designed to draw out revealing reactions and highlight the way that social media can frame women as yours to look at.

It was also a story with a narrative arc, pictures, words, and an actress—all the ingredients that make up a movie. So it should not surprise that Ulman now finds herself a rather accomplished filmmaker, with her second feature, Magic Farm, in theaters nationwide starting May 16. Magic Farm follows her dark comedy El Planeta (2021), in which a mother-daughter duo scam Spaniards in order to make ends (barely) meet, all while rocking fur coats and glamorous sunglasses. Ulman’s new film, starring Chloë Sevigny, tells the story of a crew of American journalists traveling to Argentina to record an episode about a musician who, it turns out, lives in a different San Cristobal—a town name ubiquitous in Latin America. There, they meet memorable locals, several visibly affected by pesticide pollution. The result is an absurdist satire of American hipsters.

There’s a thread connecting Excellences and Perfections, El Planeta, and Magic Farm, but it is not a visual or stylistic one. At first, all three seem to center on obsessions with superficial things, like beauty or online followers. But what resonates most is the social and political commentary that Ulman sneaks subtly into her work, always with a light touch—and without necessarily taking a clear stance. Below, she opens up about her big pivot between the worlds of art and film.

How has it felt to go from making art, where you have your hands on every aspect, to directing big film productions?

I still have my hands on all the parts, everything from photography to costume design. That’s why I’m going to stop acting in my own films—acting, directing, and producing can be truly a nightmare and more than is physically possible. On top of that, I don’t even like acting that much; it tires me.

I have a very clear vision of what I want, though I love delegating when people are good at their jobs. [Laughs]. Which is why I think directing always starts with casting: Who do you pick to work with you that you trust?

You wrote Chloë Sevigny’s part in Magic Farm for her, and you also worked with friends.

Yes, and my director’s assistant, Carmen de la Roca, has been involved in my work since I was making video art. For Magic Farm, I was surrounded by people that I trust—girls that I trust, really. I started in the art world when I was very young. I was abused both financially and physically, and then I got into [a bus] accident. It was all very traumatic, and I’m not just throwing that word around. There was all this exposure, but no mentorship, no guidance. Just all these older men moving me around, and a lot of galleries thinking I might be a money cow.

But I don’t work that way. I never wanted to have a large studio with a lot of people working for me. I don’t even have a studio practice. I mostly work by walking around, getting on buses, looking at people, and then writing. For specific projects, I might hire some help. I quit all my galleries last year, but I haven’t quit art.

The film industry is insane too. People work until they have a heart attack. But I’ve always been surrounded by people who care about me, and also about the longevity of my work—not just taking advantage of me. El Planeta was the first time that I had mentors I could call and ask, “Hey, what do you think about this?” or “How does this work?” I felt protected, and like people were rooting for me. In the art world, I felt hyper-exposed and then abandoned once I didn’t do another Excellences and Perfections.

How did you find your mentors, and who are they?

It happened organically. In film, there’s more incentive to share, because everything is so collaborative and you need people. [Fellow director] Eugene Kotlyarenko gave me the best advice ever: Get a cameo from a known actor. I got Nacho Vigalondo, who is very famous in Spain, to play the part of the john in El Planeta. That gave us this stamp of legitimacy. And then Miranda July sent the film to Sundance. She’s also the one who got me my current agent. Scott Macaulay, the editor of Filmmaker Magazinebut also a producer—he produced Gummo—is one of my best friends, and I talk to him all the time. It helps so much to able to ask, “Is this normal? Am I getting ripped off?” My friend, the director Daniel Schmidt, gives me intel regarding how much things sell for. The list of people doesn’t end. I never had that in the art world.

For an issue of Art Papers I edited a piece you wrote about having invisible disabilities. I noticed you included some visibly disabled people in Magic Farm.

What are peoples’ expectations of somebody with disabilities? How do you react to somebody that looks different—like [actor] Mateo Vaquer, who I found on TikTok? I saw a video of him on the shoulders of his friend, throwing around his T-shirt at the club. He was so good at dancing. We met up when I was location-scouting, and I saw that he was very extroverted and fun, and loved the camera. I altered the script to fit him in.

Thankfully, my producers were flexible. I know from my own disability how important that is: I didn’t want to give him a super-strict schedule. So I decided that, whenever he’s feeling good and ready to go, we’ll add him to the scene. I didn’t want to force it. I know how tempting it is to lie about how well you are doing and push through. A lot of the stories that he tells in the film are stories that he just brought up during lunch. I wanted him to represent himself the way he is. You can be disabled and also be super-sassy and love drugs or whatever! Yet whenever you see people that look like Mateo onscreen, it’s a scary film. I just wanted to normalize it all.

In the film he’s disabled because of pesticide poisoning. You also had family members whose health was affected by agricultural chemicals.

Harm is everywhere. That’s what the film is really about: There is no escape. It’s not like the Americans will go back home and then be safe. My mom’s side of the family—my grandma is in the film!—is part Indigenous, from Northern Argentina. In the ’70s, there was a mass exodus from the countryside to Buenos Aires. Most of the family moved, but a few people stayed in the countryside. One person was going blind, but nobody wanted to talk about it. My mom was outraged: Where were the activists?

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to prove a culprit scientifically, since it can affect everyone differently—cancer, a missing limb. It takes a serious study to start seeing patterns, and these studies are rare in small villages. Plus, when you’re sick, the idea of fighting against multinational monsters is a lot.

You have your own production company, Holga’s Meow—named for your late cat.

It’s partly a way for me to get credit for the production work that I do, but I also want the company to start funding smaller projects. I want to help other women and younger people coming from the art world. I learned from my own experience that a little guidance can go a long way. I want it to be like Elara Pictures [a production company cofounded by the Safdie brothers and others] for girls. Elara is very bro-y.

Did you always see yourself making films?

I’ve always been very narrative, but I never really thought I could make a film. I knew the way I liked to work made my life hard as an artist. I work project to project, on things that have a clear beginning and end. But when one picture from a series would get shown out of context, it was hard for some people to understand, and hard to market. At least when there’s an excerpt or screenshot from a film, you know you’re missing context.

A lot of your characters have somewhat glamorous or exciting lives but are struggling financially, which is a lot like working in the art world. Do the working conditions of the film industry feel different?

In film, there are unions that make sure everyone gets paid. Sometimes I butt heads with the unions, especially when it comes to disability, because they make things less flexible. But at the end of the day, I’m happy that people get a living wage. Also, since film is more collaborative, burning bridges is risky. You can’t be too big a douchebag, because you’ll need to ask favors of other people.

In film, you need protections like insurance on set in case someone gets hurt. But in the art world, I went to so many fairs with so many galleries and never felt protected, even when I devoted my whole life to a project. In fashion and in art, people suffer—and do a lot of Adderall and cocaine just to sustain what they are doing.

In the art world, I felt like I was having to prove myself to galleries over and over again. When I felt confident about an idea, it would usually sell—even things that are supposed to be hard to sell! Whereas some things that galleries pushed me to do, thinking that they’d be more commercially viable, didn’t sell. I stopped trusting the galleries and started doing my own thing.

What’s your next film about?

It’s based on a short story I wrote called “The German Teacher.” It’s set in Spain, and based on a real private debt collection agency, El Cobrador del Frac, that you can hire. They send a guy in coattails and a top hat to follow you around, and everyone knows what it means. He trails you and shames you, until you pay. In my story, the government implements a law requiring every company to diversify. So the protagonist becomes the first female cobradora. The man she’s hired to follow happens to
be this German teacher she had an affair with when she was in high school—and hadn’t
seen since …  

Though an intricate sprawling feat of both Maximalism and engineering, David Altmejd set out to create his latest tour-de-force sculpture The Serpent (2025) with little planning—opting instead to figure out his work’s meaning and form as he worked, letting his materials guide the way. Many of the best artists work this way: After all, if you already knew what a work was going to be, or could say in a few sentences what it means, why go through the hassle of making it at all? In the final form, which is on view at White Cube in New York through April 19, Altmejd’s process of play and exploration is abundantly evident. And though the Los Angeles–based Canadian artist works intuitively, he reflects thoughtfully all the while, learning from and dialoguing with his creative process—as captured in the interview below.

The process of making is always at the heart of my sculptures. That’s why I leave all the seams and traces of my hand untouched: I’m fascinated by how an object can carry the memory of its own making.

For the past few years, the snake has been slowly emerging in my work, shyly and subtly. I work very intuitively, so when I say things like “the snake emerged in my work,” I really believe that’s how it works. At first, I wasn’t ready to tackle such a loaded symbol. But recently, maybe because of where I was in my life, I became ready to face it.

I decided to make a snake from a series of heads. I had no idea what it was going to look like, the size that it was going to be. But I’ve been working on heads as long as I’ve been making sculptures. The process felt like making a necklace out of beads, putting pearls on a string one after the other.

Because I knew The Serpent was going to be unpredictable and chaotic, I decided first to make a sculpture called Snake Charmer (2025)as a kind of counterbalance. Snake Charmer was present in the studio, giving out calming vibes as the chaos was emerging. The sculpture shows the bust of a figure playing the flute multiplied 36 times, combined into a sort of grid.

Then I started working on The Serpent. At first, I imagined that all the heads making up the serpent would be identical. But very quickly, I learned that the limitations of the process [cast epoxy clay] meant that it would be better to let each head have its character. So I decided to push the work in that direction, making all the heads different. They’re all casts of my head, but sometimes, I changed the nose or made the head more feminine. Soon, it was as if the heads all symbolized different moments in a life. Stepping back, I could even see clear chapters: There’s a rise, there’s a fall, there’s a death, there’s decay, there’s a transformation. But as I said, I work very intuitively. So these are reflections that I have while I’m working, not ideas I’m trying to illustrate.

People have been asking me if The Serpent a self-portrait. I guess so, in certain ways. But I also wonder what defines a self-portrait: Does it have to be a conscious representation of the self? Because this wasn’t. Almost every sculpture I make starts with a cast of my own head, just for practical reasons.

I’m becoming more and more aware that whatever shape a sculpture takes results from a desire that’s in the material: The material always wants to be shaped a certain way. I think a lot about the unconscious as defined by Carl Jung, and think that maybe, there’s some an invisible energy in the material’s unconscious that’s just waiting for me to help it manifest.

Many people have described my work as Surrealist. In the past, I didn’t really understand this because in my mind, I understood Surrealism as more of a style. And sure, my work has weird stuff: animals, unpredictable objects. But I thought this was a superficial comparison, until I realized I’m doing exactly what the Surrealists were doing: letting the unconscious manifest.

That’s the fun of making the work: not knowing where it’s going to go, believing in the process, letting the material decide the shape. I love the unpredictability. I’m very comfortable with chaos. And I suspect chaos likes me too.

The show really began with the sculptures on view upstairs, of musicians playing swans as instruments. After making them, I thought: Oh, they could be playing music for dancers. So I made dancers, and I started to think that, as a sculptor, really I’m just playing music and making the material dance. I don’t want to impose a choreography on it. I want to let it find my rhythm.

In the corner of The Serpent’s plinth, a rabbit is peeking out of a hole. I’ve been working with rabbits for a few years. I started doing so because I’m always drawing on my sculptures, but with a human bust, cheeks and foreheads don’t leave room for big drawings. So I thought: If I made big rabbit ears, I could use them as a drawing surface.

Afterward, I realized that my connection with the rabbit is much deeper, dating back to my childhood. Soon, I became really interested in the rabbit as trickster—not necessarily as in a character that plays tricks, but as a sort of spirit that can both be in the world, and also go underground through a hole, navigating dark channels underground. In Alice in Wonderland, it’s the White Rabbit who leads Alice into her own unconscious, where she meets the Queen and all these characters. For me as an artist, that’s the most important tool I have: the ability to dig beneath the surface and to access the darker space of the unconscious—and then come back above ground.

—As told to Emily Watlington

Political discourse has always flowed freely in Harmony Hammond’s art. Hammond arrived in New York in 1969, months after the Stonewall riots rocked Greenwich Village. Against the backdrop of the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements, she came of age as an artist while attending consciousness-raising meetings and participating in the founding of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women-run nonprofit artist cooperative in the United States. After coming out in 1973, Hammond became an outspoken proponent of lesbian feminism, coediting the 1977 issue of Heresies dedicated to lesbian art, and curating “A Lesbian Show” at the artist-run venue 112 Greene Street in 1978. Decades later, she literally wrote the book on the subject: Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, published by Rizzoli in 2000.

Related Articles

Going Beneath the Surface: For 50 Years, Harmony Hammond’s Art and Activism Has Championed Queer Women

Art in America’s Spring “Wellness” Issue Features Abortion Art, Marina Abramović’s Longevity Method, Artists Turned Therapists, and More

Over the last five decades, Hammond has forged a materially conscious and process-oriented vocabulary that mobilizes modernist formalism to political ends. In the ’70s, she incorporated fabric remnants into a radical body of textile-based paintings (like her “Floorpieces” from 1973) and sculptures (such as Hunkertime 1979–80) that drew upon traditions associated with women, the domestic sphere, and non-Western cultures. Encoded in the language of abstraction, sociopolitical concerns continue to figure in Hammond’s recent paintings. Working through emblematic processes—including binding, tearing, piecing, patching, and suturing—on almost monochromatic surfaces, paintings such as Patched (2022) and Double Cross I (2021) caution against patterns of violence, and cipher collectivity for disenfranchised voices.

A defining voice in contemporary feminist and queer abstraction, Hammond has received her due in recent years: In 2019 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum held a 50-year survey of her work and, last year, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. “FRINGE,” a recently opened solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe on view until May 19, focuses on work produced since 2014, including her series of “Bandaged Grids,” “Chenilles,” “Bandaged Quilts,” and “Crosses.” A.i.A. spoke with Hammond about the processes and material metaphors that have characterized her practice from the 1970s to today.

“FRINGE,” the title of your SITE Santa Fe show, can be read a number of different ways. What does it connote to you?

It’s a verb and a noun. The idea of fringe and fringing has to do with edges and marginalized spaces. Going back to the 1970s, the metaphorical associations of edges as meeting points have interested me and been crucial to the formal strategies that I employ. Are people pushed to the fringes, or do they choose to be there? How do things or people meet at those edges? Is there a tension, a friction, a negotiation? The fringe is not just a passive place. In fact, it is very active and charged. It’s the place that I choose to occupy.

Layers and what is hidden underneath are recurrent themes in your work. How are you thinking about visibility and opacity?

I’m trained as a painter. I work via accumulation. From my fabric work of the ’70s to the work I do now, it’s additive. Whether you call it painting or sculpture, that’s what I do. In my early “Bags” and “Presences,” the hanging strips of paint-saturated cloth are three-dimensional brushstrokes. Accumulation over time, over space—that sense of building from the inside out—is very much about agency and occupying space.

The works of the last 15 years exist in a third space between painting and sculpture. They build up paint slowly and intimately in thick, near-monochrome layers. The painting becomes a metaphor for the body. There was a period where the paintings were a dark phthalo blue, at times looking black or iridescent. The color and surface were fugitive, or what we could call queer. Recent paintings are mostly lighter in color, emphasizing surface incident. Lumps, bumps, protrusions, seams, splits, stains, and grommet holes formally open up the pictorial space. At the same time, they suggest body orifices, or wounds, with the paint acting as a healing poultice. When I wrap a painting, the straps often wrap around the edges to the back. You can think of that as bandaging, binding, bondage, but it is also embracing the painting. It’s about strengthening—like an athlete bandaging a knee.

How do surface and texture factor in?

In my recent paintings, light and shadow are crucial. The surfaces are very much in relief—interesting words!—returning to the idea of edges. When I think of edges in painting, I don’t just think of the perimeter; I also think of the painting surface as an edge between art and life, those bumps pushing up from underneath, seams splitting open, or what looks like body fluids oozing out of the holes. I’m thinking conceptually about the underlayers of paint and color. I’m really interested in what’s buried and asserting itself onto or through the top surface. The shadows have to be there, as do the fabric’s seams and loose threads. Seams are connectors. I like the connections to be visible. It’s what I call a “survivor aesthetic,” making a whole out of pieces.

All these visual strategies have meaning attached to them. I’m using the materials and how they are manipulated to bring social and political content into the work, which is actually quite formal. For example, a piece of fabric that’s cut has a different feeling than one that’s torn and fraying. Materials have histories and memories, whether they’re traditional art materials or what we would call nonart materials.

The metaphorical relationship between material and concept is fundamental in your work. How are you working with language?

Words come and go in my work. I mostly use them to suggest connections or to tell a story that needs to be told. But I also use words in relation to various visual strategies. For example, in my series “Bandaged Grids,” I affix bandages over a grid of holes that suggest wounds. The fabric strips that bandage the painting body are mostly horizontal. When I look at those, I often think of them as sentences—words covering up and over. In the “Double Cross” paintings, doubling is about sameness and difference—and, therefore, queer desire. But “double cross” also suggests betrayal. I am playing with words. I use visual imagery with meaning attached to it in the same way that we attach meaning to text.

In my abstract paintings, voices assert themselves from underneath the surface skin of paint. To me, that’s a political statement. But there are times I do a piece that is more overtly political. There are a few of these works in the SITE exhibition—Bandaged Flag (2021), Patched (2022), or Voices I (2023). Voices I, for example, is composed of pieces of vintage linoleum with fragmented quotes from the French lesbian feminist writer Monique Wittig, one of which asks, “what have you done with our desire?” Both ways of working are about the same thing: voice, censorship, agency.

From the ’70s through the ’90s, you created sculptures informed by an additive sensibility. That dimensionality is still in your current work, but there is also a dialogue with modernist painting. What do you see as the continuities between these bodies of work?

In the early ’70s, content that reflected the lives and experiences of women was not welcome in the painting field. Many feminist artists stopped painting and began to work with materials and techniques that reflected women’s lives and traditions of creativity. That’s when I began to work extensively with fabric, absorbing, embracing, and flaunting traditions of weaving, needlework, and the art of non-Western cultures.

My early fabric works were unstretched—I was painting on blankets, sheets, and curtains hanging push-pinned to the wall, the weight of the acrylic-saturated fabric altering the painting rectangle. Gradually they moved off the wall into space and I realized that I was a painter making what people call sculpture. When I titled the sculptures “Presences,” I was intentionally claiming the notion of presence as essence made visible, in opposition to Michael Fried’s gendered theorization and dismissal of that term. A lot of my work at that time had to do with women taking and occupying space. When I talk about presence, even in the paintings I do today, I’m talking about work that occupies a space larger than its physical space. Going back to the ’70s, that’s paralleled in an early women’s movement phrase: “The personal is political.”

And those processes became the basis for a new modernist framework?

In 1974 I began a series of “Weave Paintings,” that brought gendered traditions of woven cloth back into the painting field on my own terms. The surfaces of these stretched canvases were slowly built up with layers of oil paint mixed with Dorland’s wax medium. I then incised herringbone or braided “weave” patterns into the top layer, cutting into the skin of paint to reveal underlying color. The paint wasn’t completely dry while I worked, causing little points of paint to protrude. These were slightly menacing, but also fragile, and mirrored the painting’s irregular contour. From a distance, the paintings appeared monochrome, but up close, the under colors showed through. The “weave” paintings anticipated many of the concerns in my current work—participating in the modernist narrative of abstraction and, at the same time, challenging or interrupting it with political and social content. 

Faith Wilding (b. 1943) is a foundational feminist artist of Womanhouse fame. She grew up in a forest surrounded by nature, an experience that laid the groundwork for her work’s environmentalism. Starting in the 1970s, her drawings—which often combine imagery from illuminated manuscripts and botanical illustrations—transported that wisdom to galleries in urban centers. At these shows, viewers largely cut off from nature’s magic were prompted to marvel at its beauty and appreciate its life-sustaining work.

Her current show at Anat Ebgi gallery in New York, “Faith Wilding: Inside, Outside, Alive in the Shell,” is on view through March 1. It surveys 50 years of her art, spanning everything from difficult work confronting feminist issues, as in Raped Dress (Battle Dresses), 1993–94, to more decorative pieces inspiring viewers to appreciate natural marvels. Combining political commentary with unabashed aesthetic pleasure, Wilding’s oeuvre both models new worlds and mounts critiques of the existing order of things. Her work stands apart from that of her contemporaries for demonstrating what the artist is fighting against, but also what she is for. Below, the artist walks us through her show and reflects on her career.

The show opens with Bird of Paradise: Virgin Goddess, a gold leaf painting from 1978. It shows a plant bursting forth from its bud. The plant is drawn in pencil: it’s the goddess of nature, the goddess of life. But it’s surrounded in gold leaf, which has historically been reserved for religious works. I used gold leaf here to emphasize how incredibly important nature is.

I made this work at time when feminists were reminding the world how mainstream religion had forgotten that so many cultures worshipped goddesses. Bringing goddesses back was very much a feminist protest.

Back then, in the ’70s, we were forming all these feminist groups. I was in Los Angeles, and we were doing Womanhouse [a formative 1972 project by a group of feminist artists that involved taking over a domestic home and turning it into an exhibition space]. There, I made Waiting, the piece I’m most famous for. One day I was having dinner with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven, and I said that I wanted to do something about waiting, about the ways that women are asked to wait for things rather than take the lead. So, we hosted a workshop where we went around in a circle and asked different women: What have you had to wait for? What did it feel like? From those conversations, I wrote and performed a poem. People cried. It had a lot of power. [A video is on view in the show.]

As a child, I was always drawing. I still do. At Womanhouse, though, I got to do things I’d never done before, like crochet a whole room—that was pretty awesome—and my first performance.

At the same time that we were doing Womanhouse, the destruction of nature was coming up as a political issue. My work was connecting what was happening to nature with what’s happening to women. Women are specially connected to nature through reproduction and care, and in some ways, it’s our job to protect and nurture it.

I grew up in a commune in the middle of a forest in Paraguay. We were incredibly reliant on nature and plants; that made me very alert to the importance of protecting it.

In the commune, I started reading Hildegard von Bingen at a young age. I found her books on my parents’ shelves. She was 12th century nun who, in her time, wrote about female life-giving power and the goddess of nature. Her language was so sensual; she even wrote about female orgasm. I read everything I could find on her, and even made the pilgrimage to her convent [in Disibodenberg, Germany], where nuns still talk about her. She was an early feminist naturist, writing in the 12th century about the destruction that human life was having on nature. She had a big influence on me; Hildegard and I, from 1986, imagines us together.

I’m always stealing from illuminated manuscripts. In Paraguay, I studied manuscripts in reproduction. Then, I started traveling and, in 1961, moved to the United States. I visited a lot of convents, exhibitions, and archives. I wanted to figure out how they made patterns and edges. I noticed manuscripts have a lot of plants in them. And you know, it’s all very decorative. So, I don’t apologize for decoration anymore.

I’ve always been into beauty, really. As a child, I made art in order to make beautiful things. I just wanted to make the most beautiful flower I could for my mommy!

But as André Breton would say, “Beauty must be convulsive, or not at all.” It can overwhelm us—as nature often does. Growing up in South America, oh my god was nature overwhelming. In my drawings, I want people to notice and admire things that they don’t ordinarily, like a leaf. Leaves can be so amazing up close. That’s why I made them big in works like “Leaf Series” [1976–78]. My work is all about nature and beauty, and putting those two together. I always say that I use beauty as a terrorist tactic.

The most recent works in the show include Forest in Flames, Paraguay’s Last Trees [2020] and When the Trees Died [2024], because that’s what’s happening now. It’s terrifying. Without trees, there’s no oxygen. Not enough people realize what trees do, and how incredibly important they are. Trees were worshiped in the old times. They were sacred. —As told to Emily Watlington

Working in the contexts of dance, drawing, painting, installation, and writing, New York–based Ralph Lemon has expanded what art can be through a generative practice that questions the conventions of his different disciplines and his body’s relationship to each. Through an interest in theater, he discovered dance by the likes of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk. He recalled seeing Monk’s Quarry: an opera in three movements (1976) and being completely “in wonderment of the body” and the “totality of her idea of performance.” Lemon followed Monk around in 1978 to experience her performances and joined a workshop with her, after which she invited him to move to New York and join her company.

Born in 1952, Lemon rose to prominence in the ’80s downtown scene as founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company, creating works like Joy (1990), set to a score composed by John Cale. He disbanded the company in 1995 and, over the course of some 10 years, developed what would become the Geography Trilogy (1996–2004), which explored his research into the cultures of Africa, Asia, and the American South, and their various traditions of dance and movement. The work took the form of movement-based multimedia pieces; part three, Come home Charley Patton, involved close collaboration with Walter Carter, a former Mississippi sharecropper with whom Lemon worked until Carter’s death in 2002.

Lemon exhibited hundreds of drawings in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, in a presentation that rotated during the exhibition’s run. His drawings and a video are among works by dozens of artists in “Edges of Ailey,” a show devoted to dance icon Alvin Ailey that runs through February 9 at the Whitney. And MoMA PS1 opened “Ceremonies Out of the Air” this past November, a major survey that features more than 60 of Lemon’s works made in the last decade, including 1856 Cessna Road (2002–24), a video series that incorporates documentation of his collaboration with Carter, and Rant redux (2020–24), a four-channel sound and video installation based on collaborative performance work with sculptor and sound artist Kevin Beasley. Below, Lemon discusses his long engagement with dance, working within institutions, and navigating the personal and public possibilities of art.

Had you already formulated an idea for the Geography Trilogy when you ended the Ralph Lemon Dance Company in 1995?

That was kind of an accident. When I disbanded the company, it had more to do with feeling like I was [leading] an organization more than an art practice. I was like, What do I do? My friends said, “Go to Africa. Get out into the world.” I started traveling to parts of West Africa, having a conversation with that dance community. The Geography Trilogy began with dance artists from Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea. I loved working in that foreign environment, where I was more a tourist than anything else. It destabilized any confidence I had. It took a lot of my identity apart, and I thought, I want to keep doing this. That’s how it became a three-part trilogy. It was more about the research than the making. Conceptually, it felt important to show that there’s a certain messiness to trying to understand something beyond what you understand. Ultimately, it was about the cacophony of different kinds of languages and practices. The third part, Come home Charley Patton, is about coming back home, which I wanted to be about a place I should have known but didn’t: the Black American South.

Walter Carter was a collaborator for Come home Charley Patton. What was the working process with him like?

Walter was a godhead for me. He became a symbol of a way of life, a kind of Blackness, a generative fantasy that was real. He became the locus of a lot of my work for a long time because he represented so much: a Black man in the South, born and raised in Mississippi, in a small town you couldn’t find unless you had an intricate map. He had grown up in everything I had ever read in a history book about the complex beauty and horrors of the South for Black people. We could just talk about things, and that talking eventually evolved into art making. Walter was not an artist as I know artists, but he was an incredibly creative and willing human being.

He became an avatar of myself as an old Black man in a particular history and time. We also took the work to a place that felt very speculative and futuristic, almost sci-fi. On some level, he understood all of that but from a different kind of body-politic point of view, beyond just being Black. It was an incredibly generative collaboration. When he passed away, I continued working with his family. They continued to play with what Walter and I had begun, and we’re showing a lot of that video work as part of 1856 Cessna Road at PS1.

How did you approach assembling the work for your show at MoMA PS1?

The show is not something I necessarily wanted. I find having a show in a big institution a real challenge because a lot of the work is intimate and wasn’t meant to be seen by an audience. At the end of the day, it’s an institution—there’s a certain common logic to what that is and what it might mean for me to enter a space like that. Questions that have come up are: Who’s the audience? How does an audience view what it is we’re doing?

The exhibition includes Rant redux, based on your collaboration with Kevin Beasley. How did that begin?

Kevin was a student at Yale, and I did a studio visit. He had two turntables in the corner, and he played a piece sampling dead rappers [I Want My Spot Back, 2011–12] that was the most haunting thing I had ever heard. I invited Kevin to play it for a series of dances at MoMA that I was curating, and our collaboration has grown since. Rant redux is a four-channel installation with material shot from Rant #3, a performance we did at the Kitchen [in February 2020]. It felt like an opportunity to see how this work could evolve beyond what it was as a live performance.

Do you consider your work in terms of institutional critique?

As private and as intimate as I want the work to be, it won’t exist without institutional tension. Institutional support becomes generative material. It’s something I get to argue with, transgress, refuse, try to be seen and unseen, and I find those useful tactics. As an artist, I have to have a conversation with institutional structures. They hold the work. They frame the work. I could say no. But in saying yes, there is the opportunity for something else to happen, for the work to have a different relationship with an institution and within my own practice.

Your contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial was unusual for you in that it focused mainly on drawing. Did you consider it a sort of performance too?

Adrienne Edwards [one of the Biennial’s curators, along with David Breslin] and I thought about doing a survey of drawings, and showing one series a month. When she sent me [plans] of the architecture that they wanted to use, I got to tweak it so that it felt more conducive to the series that I was sharing. It was a way for me to experiment with showing private work and see if it was going to get violated in that massive art-viewing situation. It was a way for me to not show everything while showing a lot. I enjoyed that not everyone saw everything, except for the guards, the installers, and the docents. It was a conceptual strategy for me to have a conversation with Adrienne and the institution, and a more private conversation with myself about how much I could share at that point in time.

In the end, did you feel like the work was violated by the context, or were you able to maintain intimacy and privacy?

During the show and afterward, I felt anxious about it. But now, two years later, I feel like I won. I got more out of it than the institution. It’s not about refusal. It’s just about my trying to get at that thing that’s very much a part of my practice, which is: How do you maintain what’s important about the work, that thing about the work that can’t really be shared?

Your work features in the Alvin Ailey exhibition at the Whitney. What does Ailey mean to you?

I could make an argument about him being a kind of Walter: a figurehead who represents a generational Blackness and Black culture that is and has been very important for me to confront, love, argue with, and [use to] help me navigate my own practice around the kind of made-up, emphatic history that these people represent to me. I was invited to do a work for the Ailey II company in 1987. I remember wanting to make sure that there would not be any dancing that showed hyper technique. I was wondering how I could make a work with no virtuosity.

Did you see your work as being in dialogue with Ailey then?

Ailey’s work wasn’t available to me when I came to modernist and postmodernist performance. By the time I became aware of his work, it felt foreign to what I was doing. I was a Meredith Monk and Merce Cunningham child, from a movement point of view. I thought to be abstract was the most beautiful way to think about art-making with my Black body. I also had a wonderful collaborative company of dancers, who were all white. I think back, and that’s interesting, and not at all wrong—it’s just what I needed to do and how I needed to work at that point in time. Then, with the Geography Trilogy, the work became only about bodies of color, and I’ve not gone back.
I’ve been Black and known that all my life. Now I’m choosing a way to make work that feels very infinite and/or capacious just about Blackness, what it is and isn’t, and how it feels. This infinite way of being in my body and in the world is something I feel like I can do for the rest of my life.