Space On Space: Congrats on your first show in Philadelphia. Adaptive Reuse is installed inside the Cherry Street Pier, which is itself an adaptive-reuse building. Once a municipal shipping pier on the Delaware, it is now used for artist studios and public space. What does a working industrial space give the work that a white-walled gallery can’t?

Loretta Park: Thank you! I am really happy that I got an opportunity to share my work with Philadelphia! I am so charmed by the city, and I really appreciate that there is so much exciting energy and momentum for art in the city. An industrial public space allows my work to be understood in connection with the rawness of the metal containers, beams, and the unfinished ground, while highlighting the contrasts: the softness of the fabrics vs. the harshness of the metal, the exuberance of neon colors vs. the natural colors of the space, and fluid and flexible lines vs. the straight edges of the metal containers and beams. At the same time, it is not just these contrasts that exist.

My work is made up of saturated, almost overwhelming colors, and when they cut through the industrial space, I think it makes the space a bit more humorous, less serious, and raw. The fact that the doors to the pier are not closed but wide open allows people to enter the pier risk-free, which I think invites people to more freely engage with my work. I am always thinking about the accessibility of my work both in terms of material choices and viewing. Recognizing some items that make up my work lowers the barriers to viewing and interpreting the art. When my work is shown in public space, that barrier to entry drops even further because people don’t feel like they need permission to enter. While a white-walled gallery can offer a sense of “neutrality,” a space where my work is less impacted by external elements and context, a public space widens the opportunity for the artwork to exist and be understood in constant interaction with the people and the architecture of the space.

SOS: The show was curated by Leah Triplett. How did you two meet? How did the show originate?

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mikaobayashi.com

Space On Space: First off, congrats on your invitation to participate in NADA NY 2026 with 5U Space! I’m curious how you and Leo from 5U Space originally got connected to each other? Is there anything you can share publicly about the presentation at NADA?

Mika Obayashi: Thank you! Last year, during my MFA thesis show, I happened to be in the Tyler galleries at the same time that Leo came to look at the shows. He gave me his business card, we had a studio visit, and then later I went to check out the gallery. We had several long conversations about art, the scene in Philly, and what was missing, and I found we had a lot of shared visions about what is possible. I respect his ambition, and I think he is becoming an important voice in the Philly art scene, and beyond.

At NADA, I will be showing flat paper works I made at Dieu Donné in the last six months during the West Bay View Fellowship, as well as some new sculptures from found materials. I arrived at a form of “drawing” within the papermaking process that connects back to my sculptures, and I’m excited to be able to show them at the same time.

SOS: Art fairs are loud, crowded, relentless. Your work is quiet, precise, meditative. How do you approach presenting something that asks for stillness in that context?

MO: Hopefully, my work could act as a foil to the general chaos of the fair. In this setting, and in any other gallery setting, I like to consider layers of engagement, like what can be gleaned with a passing glance, what can be understood from ten feet away, what’s the experience of viewing up close? Every layer gives something different. So even within the loudness of the fair, I think some quieter moments could push through. Because we have access to constant stimulation through our phones, it is sometimes more effective to do less than it is to do more.

SOS: Your work has been described as needing “empty space” as a central ingredient. How do you think about absence—not just as negative space, but as an active material in your installations?

MO: Space is absolutely an active material. When there is a lot of empty air around something hanging, you start to notice gravity in a way that you might not have before. When two things are side by side with a tiny sliver of space between, it can lead to tension. An object weightless in space lends to a metaphoric lightness and levity.

Putting space between things can also make something see-through, or slightly see-through. I often conflate the physical translucency of an object with honesty, as in something is honest in its materiality, its function. And this is something I try to bring to my work: a feeling of it being true or right while operating on its own internal logic. And again, less is more. Sometimes I’ll create a sculpture, and the real work comes in the form of taking away materials to give it more room to breathe rather than building it out.

SOS: From the images I saw online, your work at 5U Space in What is Sacred was so immersive that it became almost invisible within the rugged walls of the gallery. How did you and Leo collaborate on this show? Where did his curatorial hand end and your installation work begin?

MO: The original conception of the show was to re-present some works from my thesis, and Leo encouraged me to incorporate some new works that responded to the space itself. Part of the beauty of that space is the view out the windows to City Hall and the William Penn statue. I started reading about the Curse of Billy Penn, which I won’t get into here, but it’s a wonderful series of events that got me thinking about a hierarchy of space where the higher something is, the more exalted, hence why a church steeple was once the tallest point of any town. The highest building in Philly is the Comcast Center.

Since my thesis show, I’ve been more aware of the three strata of an enclosed gallery space: the floor, what’s at eye-level, and what is above the head. Because I was considering the symbolic significance of height as it related to the William Penn statue, it made sense to also consider the strata of the gallery space itself, and Leo and I spoke a lot about this and the placement of works within vertical space.

SOS: I’ve noticed several items on your CV tied to Japan, including two solo/two-person exhibitions, a residency experience in 2020 at Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan, and it looks like you studied there for a bit. Can you share a bit about your experiences in Japan and how they’ve shaped/informed your practice?

MO: I traveled to various hand papermaking studios in Japan the summer before my final year of undergrad. My dad is from Japan, but the last time I was there, I was too young to remember it. Those several months informed the work I made when I came back (my undergrad thesis), not just in technique but also in a sensitivity to material possibility.

Later, through a fellowship between Amherst College and Doshisha University, I helped teach English and enrolled as a research student at Kyoto Seika University. Japan is endlessly fascinating because on the one hand, you have the history and tradition, great food, cherry blossoms, etc. Then, on the other hand, there are salarymen passed out drunk on the train, compulsory homogeneity, racism…It’s a complicated place like any other. To take only beauty and leave the rest is disingenuous. I think I was first inspired by the sensitivity to nature that can be seen in any park or garden in Japan, but what keeps my interest is the complexity–the extremes and the gray areas all coexisting.

SOS: You make your own paper by hand. Walk us through that process—what does it feel like to build something so immaterial and fragile from scratch, and how does that labor live in the finished work?

MO: Every step of the papermaking process is evident in the finished sheet. What plant fiber, how it was beaten, how the sheet was formed, how it was dried… every variable has an incredible impact on the finished product. With every new technique I learn in paper, the possibilities of the material open up endlessly. Paper is finicky and demands a gentle touch, but the resulting works can also be dimensional and robust.

SOS: Is there a conceptual or symbolic reason for using paper other than its material qualities as something thin and fragile?

MO: When I first learned to make paper, I felt I had stumbled upon a parallel world: paper first appears ubiquitous and banal, but just below the surface lies a deep and lush history, one inseparable from human progress. I like paper for its unassuming nature and that it immediately ties me to a long history of craftspeople. When paper became widely available, so did printed text, books, and knowledge. I like to think of it as a key step in how we have intellectually evolved as humans. Now, with the digitization and dematerialization of daily life, things that are handmade become all the more significant and precious. It is increasingly important to preserve paper in the name of tradition, and simultaneously advance the medium in new ways in the name of art.

Paper is often a communal activity, and papermakers so willingly and excitedly share their knowledge with others. Art practices can often be isolating, so paper feels like my lifeline to other people. What do we have if not each other?

SOS: Other than NADA, what are you currently working on? Any shows we should keep on our radar coming up?

MO: I’ll have a show in NYC with Dieu Donné in the fall, and I’m working on sculptural display methods for flat paper works. I’m also working on hanging out with my friends: Amanda Crain-Freeland, Paolo Mentasti, and Heather Swenson. They all maintain studios in Philly and are doing great work. Paolo has a two-person show coming up at Grizzly Grizzly this June, which should be on your radar.

markthomasgibson.com

Space On Space: You’ve described yourself as an “American history painter.” The country is currently engaged in an enormous, contested performance of its own origin story—the semiquincentennial, A Nation of Artists at PAFA and PMA, FIFA, the whole civic spectacle. How do you relate to this moment?

Mark Thomas Gibson: For me, I exist in a space of trying to contextualize where we sit in American history on an almost daily basis, so the semiquincentennial feels like a natural extension of that work rather than a stretch. It is interesting to see institutions grapple with how to explore what it means to be American after 250 years, and to watch art being used as a vehicle for that conversation.

SOS: What is the point of looking back at history? Why do you think it is important?

MTG: Looking back at history has been important to me because it gives me some understanding of where I sit in the world. It is very easy to lose a sense of self and to accept whatever is being expressed by those in power as a singular truth. When we understand history, we can explore the possibility of multiple outcomes and consider how to move forward, especially in times of turmoil.

SOS: The Town Crier wears Revolutionary-era clothing and shouts like a headline feed. There’s a lot of friction between the collision of 18th-century form and 21st-century doomscrolling in that figure. Do you see your work as elegiac — mourning a promise — or is it more combative than that?

MTG: I liked the idea of using a caricature dressed in Revolutionary-era clothing as a way of breaking our sense of time, calling back to a period when an individual’s voice could ring out in a public space. Even if that individual was simply reciting information given to them, their body had become a conduit for the sharing of knowledge. I feel that people operating through social media believe they take on a similar role, perhaps subconsciously, offering knowledge, whether wrong or correct, but often secondhand, and presenting it as truth. The Town Crier, as a caricature, heightens that dynamic. He is doubling what social media and our communication at this moment are already doing. The key to the Crier is that he is text-based. In a world of video, speed, and quick looking, he slows us down and pulls us into a durational relationship with the news of the day.

SOS: You moved to Philadelphia around 2018-2019. The Artblog Radio conversation with Roberta Fallon captured you mid-arrival. Seven years in, what’s the city done to your practice? Has it changed what you make?

MTG: The city has helped me pursue any number of dreams I have had for my work. I do not think I would have been able to make the work I wanted to make until I came here. Philadelphia is vibrant, quiet, and hectic all at once. It is a community-driven city where it is easy to get to know people from all different walks of life within the arts ecosystem. I am grateful to be an artist living and working here.

The city has changed what I make, though I find it difficult to say exactly how. I was already moving through a period of change when I decided to move here, and I had already chosen to leave elements of my previous practice behind. Even so, I see a clear and marked difference between my work before Philadelphia and after.

SOS: Philadelphia has a particular relationship to the founding mythology — it’s inescapable here in a way it isn’t in New York or LA–where you’ve also spent time. “The American Dream” was crafted and signed here in Philadelphia. Has living here sharpened your historical imagination?

MTG: When one uses the word mythology, it assumes that we all share the same understanding of an origin story as it relates to America. If anything has been sharpened during my time in Philadelphia, it is the necessity to examine those origins critically and to resist accepting them blindly. They are always a contested space, especially in a city like Philadelphia, where there are people with generational histories that extend all the way back to the founding of this country. It is easy to forget that. In my work, I play with the idea of mythology, sometimes borrowing elements of history that serve the narrative well, but I believe those elements have to carry enough shared recognition to be effective. What I am always more interested in is the idea of truth. To me, the truth can be far more compelling than any myth.

SOS: I recently learned that Kati Gegenheimer is your partner. Power couple! Have you ever worked together, or is the studio a zone where you deliberately maintain separate lives? Is there a conversation happening between your practices, even if it’s not a collaboration?

MTG: Kati and I have very different outcomes in the work we make, but we share many of the same steps in the process of making. You would never know it from looking at our work, but ideas around origin, hope, desire, and held memory are present in both of our practices. We are very good at calling each other out, not in a cruel way or one that is simply looking for flaws, but in a way that comes from understanding what the other person is truly capable of, and from knowing what we have both sacrificed to live this life as artists. For that reason, we hold each other accountable. It is a special thing to be an artist who lives and breathes this work every day alongside another artist you care for and respect, not just as a partner, but as a peer.

SOS: You teach, make work, and curate—much of this work takes place in Philadelphia, which still lacks a lot of critical infrastructure its artist community deserves. How do you think about the relationship between making work here and getting it seen? What does it mean that your commercial representation is in Stockholm?

MTG: There are a number of reasons why Philadelphia has such a complicated relationship to the arts. It is a place where the visual arts should flourish, but there is a strange contradiction, almost a love and hate dynamic, between the institutions of Philadelphia and the artists who live here. Those relationships are further shaped by boards, institutional goals, financing, and historical lineage, all of which vary considerably from one organization to the next. How much money is even available within an institution’s budget to support a curator’s attempt to build a meaningful exhibition of work that relates to the current Philadelphia landscape of artists?

That said, there is no shortage of people doing the work. Platforms like Space on Space, Title Magazine, and SENSUS (established by recent Tyler School of Art MFA graduates) represent just a few of the countless groups operating to bring art and discourse to this community. What is missing is an interlocutor, someone or something that can bridge those grassroots conversations and the larger institutions, in the way that exists in other cities where major institutions more regularly engage with the dialogues being generated by invested members of their own communities.

Philadelphia also moves at a different pace than New York, but what the two cities share is this: just because you make a great show does not mean MoMA shows up to buy it out. There is always a tension between creation and reception, and the galleries I work with all have evolving relationships for exactly that reason, because nothing is stationary or guaranteed. Our perception of what we call the art world is often very far from reality. We are so heavily sold, through media and myth, on the idea that success and stability rest on specific pillars you must reach in a specific sequence. It is far more complicated than that. There are very few things beyond your own practice that you can control. Choosing which paths you wish to pursue is important, but it is equally important to recognize that those paths do not fully define who you are as an artist.

SOS: At the Made in Philly panel at Uffner & Liu in December 2025, the conversation turned to the recent art school closures—University of the Arts shutting down overnight in June 2024, PAFA ending its degree programs. Can you talk about this conversation at all? It is not available publicly online.

MTG: I think it was a real loss. The way those institutions shut down so abruptly was genuinely unprecedented. Returning to the previous question about Philadelphia’s complicated relationship with the arts, how can a city educate so many young artists within its borders and provide so few venues for that work to be shown after they leave school? The major papers here do not have an arts section that meaningfully engages with contemporary art, so the artists have to do it. Art in Philadelphia is consistently treated as an add-on, something sprinkled in for community engagement, rarely taken seriously by the city itself. I do not recall the mayor making any substantial statement about those closures or about the very real loss experienced by so many young students. That silence said a great deal.

SOS: That panel was held in a New York gallery—Uffner & Liu—showing work by Philadelphia artists. There’s something pointed about staging that conversation in New York rather than in Philly. The exhibition description even acknowledged the curator’s position as “an outsider” trying to grasp Philadelphia’s community. Do you think that distance is useful or a problem? Where does that conversation actually need to happen? Is it happening?

MTG: There is a bit more backstory to Rachel’s decision to do the show. She is from this area, from Jenkintown, and I believe she was trying not to overstate her familiarity with the city, given that she has not lived here for some time. In some ways, the show felt like an attempt to reacclimate herself with a place from an earlier part of her life, and to do so by engaging with the work and the voices of people who are actively living and working here now. That said, it was also an opportunity to bring several Philadelphia artists before a wider audience of curators, writers, and institutions who might not otherwise encounter this work.

The more important point is not the exhibition itself but the necessity for more exhibitions like it. A case in point is the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s New Grit. I see that show as an honorable opening volley in what could become a sustained conversation about the many nuanced voices of artists working in Philadelphia. That project should become an ongoing biennial, or at a minimum, a five-year survey. With the right investment of funding and curatorial attention, you would begin to see very quickly how much could develop and change. Philadelphia has long prided itself on the one-off. That has to change.

SOS: What are you currently working on?

MTG: I am currently working across several bodies of work, including an animation project, ongoing drawings for The Town Crier, a documentary, and a monograph. I am also working toward my next solo exhibition at Fleisher/Ollman this fall, which will engage with the nation’s 250th anniversary. I hope to see you there.

toddstong.com

Space On Space: In your artist statement, you mention working on extremes of scale: intimate graphite drawings and monumental scenic monotypes. Why is this juxtaposition of scale important to you?

Todd Stong: That juxtaposition parallels the extremes of queer experience, which swing from ecstasy to pain, safety to danger, community to isolation, often as quickly as passing through a door. I hope that something in that scale shift, that sense of swift and vast transition, will stay with viewers as a simple but central facet of my work.

There’s also a thrill to the sense of expanse in a 22-foot-long work beyond one’s capacity to see all at once, coupled with the quiet of an intricate 4 x 6-inch pencil drawing. That experience of seeing–both enveloping and being enveloped–is something I love about being in the world. Being up close and totally absorbed by something like an ant nest, then lifting your head to the vastness of a mountain range. That’s being alive! With art, we get to direct the rhythm of our audience’s gaze. So I like to set myself the challenge of replicating the feeling of looking from the crackle of the ground at our feet to the immensity of the horizon.

SOS: Your Peep Projects show, Becoming Hole, The Winckelmann Sculpture Park monotypes stage the construction of a monument to art history's founding—but those origins are entangled with violence, desire, and erasure. What drew you to Winckelmann as a subject, and what does it mean to build a sculpture park for someone whose legacy both enabled and suppressed queer cultural production?

TS: You could say it’s been a bit of a choice to dedicate the last few years of my practice to this Prussian homosexual with a funny name.

I accidentally discovered Winckelmann through a collection of contextual and theoretical texts on the study of art history called The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi. I have to admit I’ve only read the first two essays because I realized I needed to work with them, and I set to it almost immediately. One was by Winckelmann, arguing for the aesthetic supremacy of the ancient Greeks–all pretty tired and discredited at this point–and another by Whitney Davis that dissected and psychoanalyzed Winckelmann.

The quick and dirty of it is this: Winckelmann was a known homosexual (though that word didn’t exist in the 18th century–he would have been called a sodomite) and also the father of art history as a disciplined study. And the relationship between those two aspects of his identity was, more or less, causal. In Prussia, where he was born and lived his early professional life, he would have been executed for acting on his sexual desires, so he devoted himself to artistic beauty in lieu of the corporal, sublimating his urges onto the study of ancient Greek sculptures of young men.

Eventually, Winckelmann’s writings got the attention of the Vatican, and he was invited to work in the papal collections as their resident antiquarian. He immediately converted to Catholicism and made the leap. In the warmer and more permissive climes of Italy, he was able not only to get closer to the artworks he loved (he was a central figure in the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum that prompted the Classical Revival) but also to live his life more freely. One could often find him lounging in the city’s ruins, attended by young Italian men. And part of his job as Papal Antiquarian was to host artists on The Grand Tour, many of whom he set up with call boys. It was really an exercise in queer world-building.

But Winckelmann’s writings have a dark legacy, too. For one, he ascribes the Greeks solely to the West, positioning Europe as their sole inheritor. Secondly, he argued that greatness is achieved by imitating the past, a proposition readily championed by the artists of the day, stagnating art’s development. And his thoughts around beauty existing in form rather than color, positioning white as purity, were eventually taken up by the Nazis as evidence of the aesthetic supremacy of whiteness.

Some think Winckelmann was coming around to color’s role in beauty later in his life. But he was murdered before he could fully change course, stabbed in the stomach and the genitals by a fellow traveler at the Trieste Hotel. Intriguingly, he had journaled about his killer, Francesco Arcangeli, having gone on walks with him earlier in his stay, and he forgave him in the hours between being stabbed and dying.

Historians caution against reading too much into this. I throw that caution to the wind–my work, The Johann Joachim Winckelmann Sculpture Park (Murder and Executions), picks up right at that moment: Winckelmann’s murder. A flurry of activity surrounds the park’s construction as a crowd of bulbous men and butterfly-winged angels work in tandem, often distracted or at cross purposes, to create a monument that both honors Winckelmann’s quest for beauty and mourns its outcomes. They stage and restage the antiquarian’s murder as a psychosexual drama and make sculptures investigating state and mythic executions central to Winckelmann’s life. Violence has always circled the lives of queer people – I don’t shy away from that fact. But I also try to lovingly critique and poke fun at Winckelmann’s aesthetic theories. And I dig a well of deep empathy for this man who died brutally in a world that demanded reforging. He is an inspiration to me, a queer progenitor, a blueprint for survival in dark times, whose life I map closely along my own.

SOS: With 200+ figures across 27 panels, the work reads as an argument about collective labor as the engine of cultural production. Your press release describes identity as composed of a network of collective labor and gaze. How does the crowd function differently from the individual figure in your thinking?

TS: We are not finite beings confined to our bodies. We are manifold, existing in the minds of everyone and every living thing we've ever interacted with, whether as a wink or a lover or anything in between and beyond. If I want to represent myself, I feel I need to build out a network of such gazes.

But even though there are 200+ figures, there are really only two individuals in all of this–me, and Winckelmann. Neither of us is explicitly, singularly depicted. I could be any and all of the figures of the crowd of men building the park, or maybe I’m the one giving directions to the angels, somewhere off-screen. Winckelmann is present across the sculptures they build, but none of these are real. They are a projection, an imagining of a relationship with this historical figure whom I can't quite put a finger on. So I have to put 2,000 fingers on him.

What I am trying to do is trace my own debts to and complicated feelings around Winckelmann. There are so many parallels between us. I spent six years tutoring mostly rich kids in the suburbs of Philly, while teaching for too little pay at a private school during the day, all to save enough money so that I could abandon ship, go back to school, and study in Rome. Winckelmann made a similar (though much grander) journey, navigating from the working classes into the service of the Prussian aristocracy as a private tutor and then to the Papal collections. My unease with the rise of regressive forces in America echoes Winckelmann's fleeing from Prussia. I devote myself to beauty, making images that often stem from desire, as Winckelmann followed his desire to the study of the ancients. He tried to carve out a new world for himself, and I attempt the same–along with the tacit knowledge that the consequences of this work can never be known to me, all as I hope Winckelmann would have shuddered at the use of his writings in justifying the Aryan Ideal. And of course, Winckelmann’s role in the story of art history places him directly in my lineage: he is part of the lifeblood of the queer figuration I’ve made my home in.

I don’t believe I would be able to touch on any of this if I pared things down to simply my likeness and Winckelmann’s. To me, it feels truer to work through a crowd, kaleidoscopic, pushing and prodding at this complicated tangle of the two of us.

SOS: I read the Artblog piece about the show where Lane mentioned your inspiration from your time studying abroad at Temple Rome. Lane references Michelangelo's The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and The Stations of the Cross. I'm curious to learn more about how your experience studying abroad impacted your work as well as these kinds of religious subjects.

TS: Rome was incredible. I miss it every day, and I’m still processing everything I saw there.

But I’ll choose one moment: standing in front of Giovanni Bellini’s Virgin and Child at the Borghese Gallery with scholar and professor Anna Tuck-Scala, who asked her class, “What would this painting mean to a woman in 15th-century Italy, when the rate of infant mortality was fifty percent?” This fastidious image of a miraculous birth, which is at the same time a distillation of a mother’s solemn knowledge of her child’s death.

That was an epiphany for me. All at once, with just the slightest and perhaps quite obvious context, this symbol, the Madonna, rehashed ad nauseam in every art history 101, was set on fire with vibrant urgency. More importantly, I realized how vastly our symbols shift in meaning from one century to the next (or from one decade to the next: Roe v. Wade had just been overturned)–and that I couldn’t ever count on an audience finding some fixed meaning in the content of my work. Maybe the most I could hope for was a shared sense of formal rigor.

But then Anna asked the class another question: “What does it mean that a man, Bellini, at eighty years old, was able to paint this moment with such softness?” She told us it was her favorite artwork in that entire incredible collection–full of spectacular Berninis, Raphaels, Caravaggios–because of just how precisely Bellini painted Mary’s motherhood, something so foreign to his own lived experience. Everyone should look at that painting–it’s pure love and sorrow, simultaneously.

Then, more than anything, that trip to the Borghese became a lesson in the capacity of artists to expand empathetically beyond themselves. Of course, it helps to be Bellini to get it right. But that notion, often closed off by an art world that I think is too eager to gatekeep who can speak to what, became something of a lodestar.

I don’t think artists should make work exclusively about experiences that belong to people of backgrounds different from their own–that would be predatory and inauthentic–but I also think it’s a tragedy that we rarely give ourselves permission to expand beyond our own immediate biographies. There’s, as always, a balance to strike, and I think there are rewards for taking the risk.

SOS: I've seen your writing and art discourse around Philadelphia in my research. Notably, in Title Magazine, in Libby Rosa's catalogue for Seeing Red, and based on the Fleisher/Ollman website, you were in conversation with Molly Metz about her show Vernal Pool. How does critical writing and discourse feed back into your studio practice, and vice versa?

TS: I think of that work–being in conversation–as inseparable from my practice. The life of an artist can and probably should be so much more than keeping your nose to the grindstone, alone in your studio. Part of the struggle for all of us is how to keep the work interesting. How do we keep it living? You have to feed it. You have to read, you have to think with and about other artists, and about things outside of art. You’ve got to be in the world.

When I think about Molly’s or Libby’s work, when I write about Sianne Ngai’s theory of cuteness or the lithographs of Étienne Trouvelot, I force myself outside of my immediate interests and discover new ideas that I may or may not pull into my own work. More important than feeding my work, it keeps me interested in the possibilities of the world.

There’s a cliche you often hear in art school as you approach graduation: “Oh, it’s going to get really quiet when you leave here; don’t expect anyone to be interested in what you’re doing.” But I try to tell my students that after they leave school, things only get quiet if you let it get quiet. Everyone has the power to stay loud. Yeah, maybe you won’t get a solo show right out of school, but if you reach out to your friends and to new people, even if you’re just asking to visit their studio, you’re keeping yourself in the game.

And then, let’s say you ask them to record an interview, and you transcribe that and put it on your website, Substack, or social media. You’ve given that person a gift, and they’re not going to forget that. Maybe you send it to a media outlet and get your first publication. That’s major. And that gets you out into the world as much as the person you’ve written about. So it’s about operating in an economy of gifts. If you give of yourself, people will open up to you. And then, sooner or later, if you persist, the gift comes back. You might not know exactly what it is; it might not be a discernible, single event, but maybe it’s an energy, a community that forms around you slowly and lifts you. Maybe it puts your name on the right tongues, or maybe it just means you live among friends who think fond thoughts of you. Either way, sounds pretty good to me.

SOS: You work in Odili Donald Odita's studio. Can you talk about that at all?

TS: Odili was a grad school professor of mine, someone whose feedback I really cherished, and I think we had a mutual respect. He hired me right out of grad school in 2022, and I got promoted to studio manager in 2024. It’s been a stable and flexible part-time job that I’m very grateful for amidst the chaos of adjunct scheduling.

My primary role is quality control–I train and manage the other assistants and make sure all the paintings that leave the studio represent Odili’s vision. I also oversee his archive and inventory, tracking the comings and goings of artworks and making sure the studio hums along with all the materials it needs to keep production flowing. I still have my hands on the canvases, but I’m more often communicating with Odili about progress, relaying his directives to the studio, and checking in on the work of the other assistants.

Of course, it’s very different from making my own work. I’m not in charge. I’m just doing things the way someone else wants them to be done. Which I have to say I enjoy–I’ve always gotten satisfaction from doing something “the right way.” I took 12 years of classical piano lessons, which feels like a parallel experience. You train yourself to become a vessel for the creative whims of someone else, whether composer or artist. You let go of your own ego and negotiate another consciousness, directing your body for a moment. There’s one way of looking at assistants, which is that we are essentially tools for the artist. Another view, which I prefer, is that we are performing the artist’s hand.

At the same time, you occasionally have to embrace the absurdity of the business of making art. We’re trying to create an organized, orderly process around something that’s inherently disorderly. And I can’t try to comprehend the rhythm of Odili’s painting decisions. Sometimes a move he makes confounds me, but clicks for him (and for a lot of other people). In part, my Sculpture Park work is a reflection on working in a team to execute someone else’s vision. Commands come down from on high, and we don’t quite see the big picture. But we can trust that something beautiful is getting made.

SOS: I've been thinking a lot about José Esteban Muñoz's writings and working within and against systems. Can you speak to how your work elaborates on queer cultural production processes?

TS: Muñoz writes about queerness as a horizon—something not yet here, something we reach toward by working within available structures while pressuring them to become something else. That’s very close to how I think about my practice. I’m obviously working in a western figurative tradition, but I’m also trying to think deeply about figuration’s origins and how to retool it so it functions as a strategy for discovery and curiosity rather than pure desire, conquest, and capital.

My focus on Winckelmann is probably the clearest example. Here’s a figure who is the architect of how the West talks about art and beauty—and he was also a man who had to sublimate his desires onto ancient sculptures because the world would have killed him for them had he acted on them. His life didn’t exist outside the system; it was threaded through it, reshaping it from within. When I build a harried, thronged monument to him, I’m trying to stage that entanglement rather than resolve it.

I think queer cultural production is fundamentally collective and fundamentally about sharing gifts. And it is not limited to queerness as a purely sexual denomination. I think many in the arts function queerly simply because we have to make this world ourselves; we have to strive toward a horizon. No one is coming to our rescue.

I do it in my critical practice. I write about someone’s work, visit their studio, curate their show—and slowly a community forms. That’s queer world-building: creating infrastructure for your own survival because the existing infrastructure doesn’t exist or wasn’t designed with you in mind. Curating at FJORD, writing criticism, teaching, working in Odili’s studio—it’s all the same project of making a world I can live in.

SOS: What do you think the point of art is, especially in times like these?

TS: Art is for waking us up to the granular and grand stuff. When it is working, it shakes us out of routine and makes us sensitive to the many particularities of life. Great art functions like this: you see it and realize there was something out in the world you’d been missing, but this person saw it, and made it explicit, and now you can see it when you go back out there, too.

To be frank, I am pretty despairing of the world. I’m not very confident we have much time left here–more and more forces run faster and further out of control, and the depth of the consequences is multiplied by factors of hate and the potential for our weapons to end civilization as we know it. Somehow, despite that, art has become even more important to me, maybe because it is one of the things that keeps me sensitive to all the small moments that make this short time worth being present to.

SOS: Congrats on the invitation to present at NADA through Big Ramp. Big Ramp grew out of the ashes of Pilot Projects. What's the story of your relationship with the gallery, and how did this NADA presentation come together?

TS: Thanks! So, as I have now learned, every year TD Bank sponsors a curator to select five alternative art spaces that might not participate in NADA on their own, and they get a significant discount on their booth fee. This year, TD and NADA selected Anthony Elms, formerly of the Philly ICA, now at the Mattress Factory. Anthony selected Big Ramp as one of his five nominees, and Big Ramp selected me. The most obvious connection here is that I went to grad school with Maria Stracke, who is one of the Big Ramp members, an excellent artist herself, and a good friend of mine.

SOS: Anything more you'd like to share about NADA or other upcoming projects you're working on?

TS: I’m really excited to bring the Sculpture Park to NADA along with some smaller drawings and prints–it’ll be, in some ways, a re-presentation of my show at Peep. I’ve been trying to find a way to get this work to New York, and I’m so pleased that NADA gets to be the venue.

A couple of upcoming group shows: Addenda at Da Vinci Art Alliance this May, curated by Hester Stinnett and Katie Garth–an exhibition investigating contemporary printmaking and its relationship to history. And then I’ll be part of a show at Blah Blah Gallery, which is still a bit under wraps but should be a lot of fun.

In July, I’ll be presenting a solo show with Headstone Gallery in Kingston, NY. I’m so looking forward to it–such a beautiful space, and the folks there are so smart, kind, and supportive. I’ll show some new large prints alongside drawings, plaster monotypes, and hopefully some of my first ceramic pieces (with some help from my potter husband, Adam Ledford).

Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space: a media movement investigating the connections between land, power, and art. She’s definitely a mom, which makes her a futurist. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Learn more here: libbyrosa.com

Space On Space: You came to Philly in 2019 after completing your MFA at Cornell, having spent time in New York before that, and earned your BFA in Wisconsin. What was the Philly art community like when you arrived? Has it changed much in the past few years?

Libby Rosa: When I arrived in 2019, in Philly, I was starry-eyed with ambition and eager to create opportunities here. I think that was the time in my life when I had that energy, and Philly thankfully felt communal and welcoming, with affordable space and room to wear many hats if you wanted. I threw myself into the scene, founding Peep Projects in 2020 and taking on roles as artist, curator, administrator, assistant, project coordinator, and teacher. Many local artists do multiple jobs and still grow their careers, and Philly seems to support this better than most places.

As for how the scene has changed, it’s difficult to separate the city’s evolution from my own. I used to love the hustle and the you can do it all energy. I still do, but in smaller doses. Now, I prefer doing a few things with purpose over many activities done frantically. I look around at my friends who started this journey with me, and I wonder if we’re all hitting a collective wall or if this is just what “growing up” in an art scene feels like, wanting to shift from nonstop hustle to something more sustainable. I’m curious what a new person thinks of the Philly scene and whether they have the same excitement I did (and still mostly do).

SOS: Fire has become a sustained presence in your work, from Curtains on Fire and the witch paintings in Seeing Red at Blah Blah, through the Curved Paintings series with Eyes on Fire, and now The Matchbox at Ortega y Gasset, where the entire gallery becomes a matchbox set ablaze with flame-shaped panels. How has your relationship to fire as a subject evolved across these bodies of work? What has drawn you to this imagery?

LR: Thank you for diving so deeply into my work. Fire is one motif in a lineage of symbols I use to explore the sublime and phenomena like weather and nature that challenge human control, evoking both fear and beauty.

Initially, I was hesitant to lean so heavily into fire, especially after the wildfires in LA happened; I didn’t want to trigger anyone. But I realized that fire possesses a uniquely seductive, impulsive pull. We can’t look away from a bonfire, even though that same element can burn a home to the ground. I’m fascinated by the tension of something so attractive yet inherently dangerous. With my exhibition, The Matchbox at Ortega y Gasset, I added a new element of enlarged sewing pins to the flame painting, leaning into the absurdity and humor of our attempt to control the uncontrollable.

SOS: The witch recurs across your work as this figure of transformation and agency. Can you talk about the witch as a character in your practice? What does she allow you to do that other figures don’t?

LR: The witch is one of the only figurative characters I’ve used lately, and she started as a private impulse. I began painting a series of witches dancing just to get back into small-scale work, and I wasn’t even sure I’d show them to anyone. I was surprised by how much people connected with them, but I think we all have a personal relationship with the archetype of the witch, so maybe, like fire, I’m cheating and using things that are inherently seductive.

Over time, I’ve realized she’s the perfect analogy for the artist. I’ve represented her, shed her skin, or used a single finger to represent a green thumb in the garden. She’s my figure of agency and transformation. She taps into my earliest experiences of creating when making magic potions in the backyard as a kid. That state of mind, where making is grounded in nature, make-believe, and feeling powerful, is what I try to channel in the studio today.

SOS: Peep Projects started in December 2020, at the height of pandemic caution, with a peephole in the door as the viewing mechanism. You’ve since moved from Viking Mills to Crane Arts and built out a serious exhibition program—over thirty shows with artists ranging from the deeply local to national and international. What has the curatorial identity of Peep become, and how has it shifted from those early days?

LR: Peep originally started as a way to give artists I admire exhibitions, focusing on solo shows, which, in my opinion, are the most helpful for artists to develop their work. I really enjoyed using Peep to connect people. Showing local, national, and international artists, I believed would benefit everyone’s network and introduce exciting work to the city. After five years, there was still strong support for the gallery, but I also noticed that attendance at openings began to decline a little, and collectors were buying a little less frequently. I had to make the difficult decision to either keep things the same or transform the space into something that would demand less of my time, since my own art practice was starting to ramp up with more show opportunities. Now, Peep functions as a nomadic gallery, with a few projects each year. I’m so proud of the Peep archive and am beyond happy I devoted those years to it.

SOS: You’ve described yourself as someone who’s moved frequently, and that frequent moves have made you see borders and walls as mutable rather than fixed. How has that adaptability shaped both your art and the way you think about building community through a gallery?

LR: Moving frequently taught me that home isn’t a fixed location and that it’s a labored project. I learned early on to see the potential in a fresh start, realizing we have far more agency over our physical environments than we often assume.

Opening a gallery took this to a literal level for me. Learning to sheetrock and patch walls out of necessity completely demystified the “white cube” for me. Once you understand how a space is built, it stops being a barrier and starts being a material. This has fundamentally shaped my practice as an artist and curator; I no longer see a gallery as a static container, but as a mutable environment. The most exciting work for me right now is that which can physically transform a space into an entirely new experience.

SOS: You’re living and working in Philadelphia, but you teach and currently have a show in NYC. What does it mean to be a Philly-based artist who sustains a presence in New York? How does that look practically, with how you spend your time?

LR: Philadelphia is the ideal home base for me. First and foremost, I have invaluable friendships here and family nearby, and I have been given many opportunities here to show my work that have propelled my progression as an artist. I so love NYC and lived there for a few years, but ultimately, it wasn’t healthy or sustainable for me to stay long-term. Some people love seeing people on the street, and I enjoy seeing trees and being able to garden in my backyard!

Geographically, I appreciate that Philly is close enough to NYC to head down for shows (which I should make even more time for), but has its own strong scene where I can get inspired by exhibitions and programs without leaving. The number of exhibitions in NYC is immeasurable, though Philly does a pretty incredible job with our shows. This is really my first time having an exhibition like this in NYC, and I hope to grow my relationship with NYC more in the future.

Ultimately, I love showing my work in new places. Being invited to exhibit in different cities is a highlight of my practice; it offers a snippet of a different creative ecosystem and a chance to connect with new people.

SOS: Can you talk about your current show, The Matchbox? The photos look very cool. How has the response been? How did this opportunity come about?

LR: Thank you! I actually got this show opportunity by applying to their Open Call. Most of the opportunities I’ve had come through artist friends of mine, and in this case, it’s funny because I’ve applied to many things over the years, and it can feel like you’re shooting in the dark. So, it’s really nice that the universe eventually gave me a win.

The response has been good. Many people I love and admire have made the effort to come out and see it. January and February are tough months, though, and the weather wasn’t on our side, with a couple of snowstorms causing us to lose weekend hours. Every show opportunity is a gift, regardless of size or location; it’s so crucial for the development of my ideas. Each show I do really has its own conceptual focus that aligns with the greater goals of my work.

SOS: What are you currently working on in the studio?

LR: It’s the year of artist-run spaces support for me! I have been developing ideas for an upcoming two-person exhibition with artist Amy Boone McCreesh at Current Space, a Baltimore artist-run space, in June. I’ve also been asked to participate in a new unconventional art fair this summer at the Yowie Hotel in Philadelphia with Blah Blah called Elsewhere. This is a fun and unique opportunity to show work in one of their hotel rooms. I’ve been sketching a functional bed frame piece to show in the space alongside some fire and pin works. Lastly, I’ve been working on some public project proposals. What I really need to be doing is cleaning my studio; I left it a disaster after my OyG show was finished.

SOS: I keep thinking about these posters—Renny Pritikin’s Prescription for a Healthy Art Scene and Ceci Moss’s Ingredients for a Braver Art Scene. From your perspective as an artist and curator, what do you think is most important for shaping a healthier art world in the US and in Philly specifically?

LR: I love these posters, especially Pritikin’s. There is pressure to professionalize ourselves early in our careers due to social media. I’ve been reflecting on how I present myself to the world. I think becoming a bit messier, less polished, and giving ourselves space to be unrefined and genuine would be healthy. I also believe we should have more salon-style hangouts beyond just viewing each other’s shows. Recently, I attended a gathering where a museum curator invited artists, curators, and colleagues to play pool together with no agenda other than that, and it was refreshing. We should do more informal group activities like cooking dinner together and sharing skills. I’d love to see a poll on this and hear what others think!

SOS: What do you see as the biggest missing piece in Philly’s art ecosystem right now—funding, space stability, collectors, documentation/archives, art criticism, something else?

LR: For me, the two biggest missing pieces are collector education and sustainable documentation.

We need to invite people outside the art bubble to see the value in original work. It’s an education issue; we need to shift the culture so people choose a piece with a real history over a mass-produced reproduction. Collecting should feel like a vital investment in our community, not just an inaccessible luxury.

We also need stable, professional art criticism. Relying on artist-run work for everything inevitably leads to burnout. While I greatly respect the side hustle and those projects are vital to the scene too, we need an arts publication that is funded as a permanent, professional operation and one that is consistent, serves as a lasting archive, and remains a more impartial entity. We could start by properly funding ones that already exist such-as Title Magazine.

SOS: Can you talk at all about your upcoming solo show at FJORD in October?

LR: I’m so excited to collaborate with FJORD. They are a talented group of artists curating some of the best shows in the city, in my opinion, so I’m honored to exhibit there. I have many ideas that still need to be organized, but there is one major element I plan to include that I can share. They have agreed to let me remove their front door and replace it with my own. My door will feature a symbolic shape cutout, allowing visitors to enter the gallery through it.

thedanthology.com

Space On Space: You were born in Montgomery, Alabama, and then grew up between Washington DC and Philadelphia. Plus, you’ve done work in Guatemala and Germany, and went to grad school in Chicago. What was it like living in all these different places? How has this migratory upbringing and travel in general shaped your art practice?

Derek Anthony Holland: Places continue to make and remake me. I’ve been able to spend time in a lot of places, specifically in the U.S., and I think what I’ve found specifically permeating me is an attraction to scale, which means the variance in my work from individual to collective, anecdotal to generalizable, large to small. I ask, What are the bounds of something shared versus exclusive to one? And I am reminded of being in Guatemala, sitting in the living room of Maria Jacinta Xón Riquiac, listening to language as sound more than anything else because most of the conversation was in Spanish (which I don’t know much of). But my friends B’alam and Esvin would translate parts, and I’d understand certain phrases.

More importantly, that entire conversation and really that entire trip to Guatemala was about the labor of understanding another “other” (thinking here about indigeneity in Central America) on individual and communal levels, very practically assessing one’s capability to repeatedly speak into Google Translate, to survey unfamiliar geography. I think being Black in the US, there’s an attempt to narrativize us as citizens that belong here, when legal codes and history archived refute that. This blurs some of the ways Black people in the US are othered, marginalized, and refused humanization. But, during the conversation in Guatemala, I saw this happening similarly and dissimilarly through Maria Jacinta’s work. I was granted a perspective of othering that I had never seen in my Black American context.

So I accumulate and hold these experiences with a person, a place, a community I had never encountered. This plethora of experiences from moving about the United States that I’ve been exposed to consistently throughout my life, like the differences within the Northeast US corridor versus St. Louis or Chicago. Moving to St. Louis was shocking in ways Guatemala City could never be. Spending time in a majority Black country like Jamaica was homey and othering in ways Guatemala was not. I’ve been able to accumulate perspectives on a few manifestations of the modern world: colonized states and imperial metropoles that have really rounded out my worldview.

These experiences revealed the importance of difference but not the impassability of it. Seeing difference, spending my time in other places built a cadre of experiences able to be deployed as reference and evidence when making work. Difference can be articulated through materials to expose itself, its origins, its malleability, its truths. I am learning how to make fissures in established landscapes that hold difference and hoping that knowledge is being developed and tested there.

SOS: What brought you back to Philadelphia?

DAH: Geography and family. Philly is one of my homes. I was raised with the food, the people, and the language here. This was the first palace I was an adult exploring on my own in college. Philly’s energy is honestly very warm to me. My dad used to drive me around the city at night to look at the lights and the architecture, and that sort of glow is inscribed into my relationship to Philly. The city’s cultural and spatial geography demands respect and is off-putting to others, and I adore that about Philly. It is rich in everyday happenings, from navigating SEPTA to running into my family at events. This city has a palpable expressiveness that I love and appreciate. I have been in a phase of life where I am more alone than I have ever been, and Philadelphia forces me to keep it (as a living, breathing place) company on a daily basis: in commuting, in shopping, in seeing art, in meeting new people.

SOS: You move across writing, photography, painting, film, installation, performance, and mixed media. When you start a project, what tells you which medium is truest to the inquiry?

DAH: I don’t think there’s a more true medium for me or the subjects I’m addressing. I focus on creating entry points into my work for the audience. So, my approach has been to be critical when engaging with any material because material impacts how the audience interacts with a work. For example, in painting a more Western traditional way: on stretched canvas, with oils or acrylics, that linen and paint have a history that impacts the work, the method of application does too: color field, maximalist portraiture, motifs, symbols bring content to the work as well.-

SOS: When I look at your work, the first word that comes to my mind is “fluid.” I am seeing a process that really defies categorization, both conceptually and through your diversity of mediums. With so much openness around the process, how do you define boundaries in your work?

DAH: Conceptually, I’m not defining boundaries within my work, at least consciously. I think my practice and what comes from it supplement a similar set of goals. If I’m presenting something publicly, I want it to serve a purpose; to be something, in some way. I think money is the number one boundary in my work. I have limits on what I can make and store because of that. So, resources bind my work more than anything else. In terms of my studio practice, I work around and with the limits of my space, creating and adapting fluidly in that way. I’ll make a set of smaller multiples instead of a larger scale single, or cut canvas or other materials around the shape of my floor space, and allow that to intentionally impact my work. I try not to constrict my openness in any way. There are ideas I have for materials and methods I’ve never practiced, but it’s just not time for those yet.

SOS: Your UIC profile notes that your craft was catalyzed by studying public health and that you question how “Blackness” gets constructed for research in digital/physical spaces. What do you think art can do that public health research often can’t, and vice versa?

DAH: I think I expanded my research to weave art into it. The questions I had at the beginning of public health led me to make art. I was very interested in health communications, urban design, and its relationship to health outcomes. Those both mesh into my art making. They are spoken as different languages, though. Health communications is somewhat about getting another to engage in a different behavior: get tested, try this medicine, seek this remedy, share knowledge. Urban design is site specificity, materiality, form, and function; a close relationship to political context. Both of these are considered in my art practice.

I will say, because I started in a much more procedural, empirical public health sphere, art is or was freeing. I painted as another mode to digest what I was learning, to process and explore. I often described my practice to my peers in public health as health communication. This question is actually really indicative of a major throughline in my work: the limits of empiricism or of the rigidity of Western hegemonic modes of knowledge. I was learning about health disparities and antiblack violence through biomedical systems of “care,” and conducting health research, but it wasn’t answering my questions fully, and the modes of redress weren’t adequate. I really needed to explore other options, and thought that making art could be that. It seems now that art isn’t fully adequate either, but it does provide a more vast space to explore other ideas and methods that public health did not.

SOS: You’ve described daily observation and documentation (text/camera/phone/notebook) as “tools of data collection,” later reviewed and synthesized across visual arts and biomedical/social scholarship. How do you decide what counts as “data” in your life?

DAH: Everything is data. In the modern world, that’s something that me and the state agree on. Information to be coded has become ubiquitous in our world, with and without consent or understanding. The implications of this can be seen everywhere, from medical diagnosis to directions off the grid, to even counter by asking how there can be directions “off grid.” In all of my practice, it’s imperative to evoke the body as data, and the use of my body represents how one might use data to inform and/or generate questions.

SOS: When does “data” become a subject you’re critiquing (as a tool of modernity), and when does it become a material you’re actively using?

DAH: The critique of data is built into my practice. In my work, there is a presupposition that my body is data, and I’m laboring my body to make work, at times scientifically; there are critiques and questions to be made there. Why and how did my body come to be this? Can my body rest? Is it ever not surveilled? Is my practice sufficient to evoke these questions in others? Further, with other tools: photos, video, sound, materials such as paint, canvas, plastics, graphite, etc. How do these manipulate and rearticulate the labor of my body? I’m interested in making myths or lore through these questions, or at least laying a foundation for someone else to do it. Thinking of Sylvia Wynter, I’d like to trigger new ways of knowing through my work because we are hybrid: both bios and mythoi. And through this science, there can be creation or myth-making; Black method (as Katherine McKittrick articulated).

SOS: I keep thinking about these posters—Renny Pritikin’s Prescription for a Healthy Art Scene and Ceci Moss’s Ingredients for a Braver Art Scene. From your perspective as an artist and someone trained in public health, what do you think is most important for shaping a healthier art world in the US, and specifically in Philly?

DAH: Inquisitiveness came to me first. Then, criticality. Additionally, bravery or a type of dauntlessness. These aren’t the most tangible or practical, but they are what can lead you to those things. To decide to question, thoughtfully engage, and speak on said investigation(s) is what leads to enacting and building an accessible space, policies that support an ecosystem for art-making, resources for creative exploration, and infrastructure for those mentioned.

Audiences should question the art they’re seeing and dig into it, from the site of the exhibit to the advertisement that notified them of the exhibit, to why they don’t see more variety in public art or in art institutions; what collection ideologies do these institutions follow? Where is the funding for this project coming from? What should I demand of these public spaces? These are questions everyone should be asking, not just artists, politicians, or arts and cultural workers. Everyone. Questioning and criticality are skills that will be developed or devolved. There are also aspects of community and accountability involved here that are pivotal to both Philly and abroad.

To be brave in holding yourself accountable to critical inquiry is endearing to me. But, I haven’t or rarely seen those types of engagements in public or private art spaces, and I think they’d be deeply impactful. I recall watching debates and speeches of Black figures like Malcolm X and Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, etc.. where they spoke critically and unabashedly on observation and phenomenon in the world, sometimes they were wrong or their language is now dated, but that type of engagement is indicative of not necessarily something healthy but, something aware, something doing what needs to be done versus saying it. There was a world that 1) facilitated the availability of those speeches and conversations at the time and 2) a curious audience.

SOS: What do you see as the biggest missing piece in Philly’s art ecosystem right now—funding, space stability, documentation/archives, art criticism, something else?

DAH: Following what I just said, I often talk about Philly people staying in Philly as an issue. And I know for so many reasons people are specifically (including myself) in New York often, I wish Philly people would stay here, explore here, build here, be brave here. Chicago, LA, and New York are obviously US hubs in a national and global context. I understand the necessity and allure of them, but specifically for Philly, if artists stayed here, I just feel like the city would be different. It is one of the biggest, most advantageously located cities in the country. Further, I understand that for artists to stay there should be some sort of developed infrastructure, but that is just not the case in most of the United States (art as a funding priority). Black people and artists are often mandated to make a way in the world, and I have decided, as a Black artist, to do that here for now.

Nazeer Sabree’s artwork is in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the West Collection, and the Forman Family Collection, among many other private and public collections. Recent residencies and awards include Monument Lab Artist Residency Program (2025), Fitler Club Artists in Residence Program (2023), and Mural Arts Fellowship for Black Artists (2020). His public commissioned projects include partnerships with the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2024), Mural Arts (2025), Philadelphia International Airport (2025), and Living Walls/Adult Swim (2022). He has been profiled by reporters ranging from RJ Rushmore to Peter Crimmins, and is a 2025 Honoree of Smith Memorial Playground alongside a history of fellow honorees ranging from Quinta Brunson to William Still. He is represented by Paradigm Gallery + Studio.

Space On Space: What part of Philadelphia did you grow up in? What was it like growing up there as a boy?

Nazeer Sabree: I grew up between West Philadelphia and North Philadelphia. I lived in West Philly, but I went to school throughout North Philly, and I eventually graduated from CHAD, the Charter High School for Architecture and Design, which was located in Center City. My experience of the city was always layered. I was constantly moving between neighborhoods, energies, and worlds.

There were pockets of real joy, moments that felt whimsical and nostalgic in the way childhood can be. But there were also things happening within my family that created a domino effect, where pieces of stability began to fall apart one by one. As I got older, I spent more time outside, trying to understand what boyhood and adolescence looked like without consistent male guidance.

One of the things that truly saved me from falling into a lifestyle that could have easily consumed me was my creative interest. In high school, I was deeply involved in clubs, and that structure made a real difference. There were moments in my life when I wasn’t as connected to those spaces, and looking back now, I can see the stark contrast. Being involved gave me direction.

It often felt like walking a tightrope, trying to stay rooted in who I was at my center while resisting the seductive energy of dysfunction and street culture. Looking back, my upbringing was a constant negotiation between joy and pain, but creativity became the thing that helped me survive, stay focused, and imagine a future for myself beyond just getting through the day.

SOS: On your website, it states that your work “boldly challenges societal norms and the rigid expectations imposed on men and boys.” How is your work challenging these norms, and what kind of spaciousness are you imagining for men to enter into?

NS: I think a lot of the work begins with allowing men and boys to exist outside of performance. So much of masculinity is about armor, about survival, about learning how to be hard in environments that don’t always make room for vulnerability. My work pushes back against the idea that strength has to look one way or that emotional restraint is the highest form of maturity.

I’m interested in creating space for men to feel complex, tender, and unresolved. To sit with grief, doubt, faith, fear, and love without needing to resolve those feelings into something easily digestible or heroic. A lot of my work is about slowing down and asking what happens when men are allowed to be present with their inner lives, rather than constantly being asked to prove something to the outside world.

At its core, the work is also about storytelling. Being vocal about my own experiences and my journey through manhood is an intentional effort to give men a voice that isn’t performative or scripted, but autobiographical. It’s about telling the good, the bad, and the ugly, and spending time in the gray areas of life where most of our becoming actually happens. I see that gray space as something that moves us toward wisdom, toward a kind of rising point where lived experience, reflection, and honesty begin to converge.

SOS: I can’t stop thinking about this painting that was part of your exhibition, The Event Phase, at Paradigm Gallery in 2025. What is this piece called? Can you share more about what was going on while you were making this work?

NS: The title of the painting is Wings of a Crow. It marks the first time in my life that I truly reckoned with the passing of my grandfather, who was a huge pillar in my family. He passed away from a heart attack when I was around five years old, and he was one of the most gentle giants I’ve ever known, masculine but deeply tender.

The title comes from a moment, a few days after he passed. I was sitting on my grandmother’s bed as a child and asked her, “Grandma, do you think Pop-Pop has his wings yet?” She still reminds me of that moment. Looking back, I think what I was really asking was whether he could still come visit us. It was my way of expressing how much I missed him and how I imagined him as a kind of guardian, almost angelic in nature.

The painting itself is a reference to him in his casket, based on a photograph I found while looking through my family archives. I painted it in a way meant to honor him, using a color palette that resembles a hydrangea flower, very warm, loose, and intentionally childlike to lean into that sense of nostalgia.

Making Wings of a Crow was the first time I allowed myself to fully confront that grief. When my grandfather passed, it felt like my family began to fall apart piece by piece, and for years, that loss lived more in the background of my life. While working on this painting, a lot of that surfaced all at once.

I spent long nights in the studio, often painting into the early hours while listening to Marvin Gaye and oldies music I associate deeply with being around my grandfather and my grandmother. Some nights I couldn’t paint at all. I would just sit, cry, and look at the portrait. Other times, I worked on different paintings, giving this one space to breathe.

Friends would come by the studio, and there would be moments of laughter and conversation. I’d glance over at the painting, and sometimes it felt like he was smiling back at me. It became a quiet presence in the room.

It’s the longest work I’ve ever made. I didn’t rush it because I couldn’t. I was trying to stay present and give my grief the time and space it required. In many ways, finishing the painting felt less like completing an object and more like allowing myself to finally acknowledge and honor a love and a loss that had shaped me for years.

SOS: Your work is multidisciplinary in nature. How do your collages function differently from your paintings, video, or mural works?

NS: For me, each medium carries a different kind of responsibility.

Collage feels closest to memory. It’s fragmented. It’s layered. It’s pulled from archives, photographs, textures, fabric, found materials. The act of cutting and rearranging mirrors how memory actually works. It’s not linear. It’s not clean. Collage allows me to hold contradictions in one space. It’s where I can piece together history, family, and symbolism in a way that feels intimate and almost subconscious.

Painting feels more immersive and confrontational. When I’m painting, I’m sitting with something longer. There’s nowhere to hide. The scale, the surface, the time it takes, especially with oil, forces me to stay present with whatever emotion or narrative I’m working through. Painting feels like entering into something fully and allowing it to transform me while I’m making it.

Murals function differently because they live in public space. They aren’t just for me. They’re in conversation with a neighborhood and with people who may not walk into galleries or museums. There’s a different kind of accountability there. Murals are about access and dialogue. They allow the work to exist outside of institutional walls and meet people where they are.

Video introduces time and movement. It allows atmosphere to breathe in a different way. With video, I’m thinking about pacing, silence, sound, gesture. It becomes less about a fixed image and more about an unfolding. It can feel cinematic and reflective, almost like inviting someone into a moment rather than presenting them with a finished statement.

All of these elements help me world build. They enrich the continuity of my work and deepen the language around it as I move forward, making the thing I’m in search of clearer. At its core, that search is about the pursuit of healing. What does that really mean? How do you become the Ubermensch in the truest sense? For me, it begins with looking inward and investigating wounds. These mediums allow me to do that work in a way that feels transformative and guarded rather than exploitative. They give me structure, protection, and depth as I navigate those interior spaces.

SOS: What is the function of art? What do you want art to do?

NS: I think the function of art is to bear witness. To record what is happening internally, spiritually, emotionally, even when the world doesn’t have language for it yet. Art becomes a document of being human.

For me, art isn’t about decoration or spectacle. It’s about investigation. It’s about looking inward and having the courage to sit with what you find. When I’m making work, I’m trying to understand something I don’t fully understand yet. The canvas becomes a site of questioning.

I want art to transform people, but not in a loud or forceful way. I don’t need it to shout. I want it to move quietly. I want someone to stand in front of a piece and feel seen in a way they didn’t expect. I want it to create space for reflection, especially in a world that moves fast and rarely gives us time to process.

Art, at its best, is a bridge. It connects the private interior life to the public world without turning it into performance. It allows vulnerability without exploitation. It allows memory to exist without distortion. It allows grief to breathe.

If my work can do anything, I want it to help people look inward without fear. Because that’s where healing starts. And I think when enough individuals do that work honestly, culture shifts.

SOS: How can art function as a healing modality?

NS: I believe the studio becomes a third space, not just for young people, but for people in general. Most of us live between duty. You go from home to work and back again. Or if you’re younger, it’s home, school, maybe a job, then back to your dorm or your house. All of those spaces are structured around responsibility.

A studio is different.

When you step into a studio, especially one that feels welcoming, you’re entering a space where you aren’t defined by duty. You’re not performing for grades, money, or status. You’re just present. The energy shifts. And yes, that energy depends on the host, on the artist who is holding that space. But a studio visit shouldn’t only be about getting your work seen for a show. There’s something deeper available there.

The studio can become community. It can become a place where inspiration is exchanged and where a torch is quietly passed. Not in a forced way, but in a human way. When someone comes into your studio, there’s an opportunity for transformation just through proximity to creative energy. Not for them to be in awe of you as an artist, but to engage the way we hope people engage in galleries and exhibitions, only more personal.

That’s where the healing component starts to activate.

Most people who come into a studio aren’t working through the exact same things you are, but when you invite them to play, to experiment, to make something, even loosely, that act becomes a mirror. Whether it’s structured or free, whatever they create often reflects something they’re carrying subconsciously. It gives form to emotions or experiences they may not have had language for.

And when they leave, they leave with something new. Maybe it’s clarity. Maybe it’s a new way of seeing. Maybe it’s just a shift in energy. But that shift can spark the beginning of a healing process.

It doesn’t have to be overly calculated. How many times have we simply seen something that changed us? Inspiration alone can alter direction. As artists, we have the privilege of living in that energy consistently. Most people don’t, because they’re bound to duty.

The studio becomes a place where people can imagine, breathe, and not worry so much. And sometimes that breathing room is the first step toward healing.

SOS: What do you see as the biggest missing piece in Philly’s art ecosystem right now: funding, space stability, documentation, art criticism, or something else?

NS: Honestly, I think it’s all of it, and it starts with funding.

At the core, I don’t think the city truly values art at the level it should. You see money funneled into sports, large-scale development, construction, projects that make the city look like a copy-and-paste version of somewhere else. Meanwhile, there is an incredible concentration of creative talent here across music, fashion, visual art, comedy, film. And too often, artists feel like they have to leave the city to receive recognition or sustainable opportunity.

Funding changes everything.

When there is real financial investment in the arts, the rest of the ecosystem begins to strengthen. You get stronger institutions. You get better publications. You get serious art criticism. You get trusted voices contextualizing the work and pushing artists toward refinement. Critique isn’t about tearing things down. It sharpens aesthetics. It deepens dialogue. It helps work travel beyond its immediate geography.

Right now, too much of the work risks living and dying within the region. Without strong promotion, strong writing, and consistent support, it’s hard to push past that threshold. Someone in New York might see something online, but without the right infrastructure around it, they may not feel compelled to make that short trip. That doesn’t mean the work isn’t worthy. It means the ecosystem isn’t amplifying it properly.

It’s also about space. There can’t only be a handful of strong galleries in a city of this size. When opportunities are limited, artists hit ceilings early. Momentum becomes difficult to sustain. And if artists can’t afford studios or living expenses because there isn’t enough investment or collector culture locally, then we lose talent.

Artists alone cannot carry an ecosystem.

Yes, we have to produce strong work. That’s our responsibility. But without buyers, critics, institutions, publications, and well-supported spaces, the structure weakens. All of those parts have to move together.

I do believe Philadelphia has the potential for a renaissance. We’ve done it before. If you trace the origins of so many cultural movements, especially in music, you’ll find that a lot of roads lead back here. The talent is here. The hunger is here.

But we have to be honest about what’s missing in order to build something sustainable.

Learn more about Nazeer’s work here: nazeersabreestudios.com

Space On Space: Where in Pennsylvania did you grow up, and what was the visual culture of that place for you (landscape, architecture, textiles, signage, museums)?

Natessa Amin: I grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania, in a suburban neighborhood just above the Bushkill Creek, where it runs into the Delaware River. In one direction was the Crayola Factory, in the other was Bushkill Park, one of the oldest amusement parks in the country, perched right along the creek and known for flooding with some regularity. I was surrounded by woods and greenery, punctuated by sudden bursts of high-saturation color from hand-painted funhouse signage and Crayola’s branding.

My neighborhood was built in the 1980s and 1990s by a Sicilian immigrant, so many of the houses had arched vestibules framing their entrances, Mediterranean gestures quietly transplanted into eastern Pennsylvania suburbia. At the time, that felt completely normal.

The broader visual culture was similarly layered but unmistakably Pennsylvanian: painted barn signs, quilting, woodcraft everywhere. None of it was framed as symbolic or precious. It was functional and familiar, part of daily life. Looking back, growing up in that environment trained me to understand visual culture as an accumulation rather than a style, shaped by industry, landscape, and whatever happened to be nearby.

SOS: In your Maake interview, you talk about being “hyphenated.” When you pull from Indian and African textiles, and Pennsylvania Dutch fraktur/quilt traditions, what guides the translation into painting or installation?

NA: I think about the hyphen quite literally, as a mark that creates a link. For me, hyphenating is not just about naming identity. It is about connection, about holding surface and form in relation to one another. When I am pulling from Indian and African textiles alongside Pennsylvania Dutch fraktur or quilt traditions, I am less interested in blending references than in understanding how those systems operate structurally.

I am making the work through the lens of a biracial person whose identity is already structured as a link rather than a singular origin. That lived condition shapes how I think about visual language, not as something that resolves cleanly, but as something held in tension. What guides the translation is attention to how pattern functions across materials: how it organizes space, carries labor, builds rhythm, and accumulates over time.

In the studio, these references act more like connective tissue than imagery. I am not trying to smooth differences into harmony or legibility. Instead, I let surface and form, history and material, remain in conversation; the hyphen becomes a working method, an active link, holding multiple systems together without asking them to collapse into sameness.

SOS: Your work moves between abstraction, pattern, and protection symbols. Do you feel in conversation with Pattern and Decoration, or do you resist that category?

NA: I remember first learning about Pattern and Decoration at a pivotal moment in grad school. I had not known much about the movement before then, and at the time, it was not considered cool to associate with that visual language. Still, I felt an immediate connection.

Around that same period, I was beginning to think more seriously about belonging in relation to my identity as a biracial person and my connection to my South Asian heritage. Learning about Pattern and Decoration mattered because it offered a precedent for taking ornament, pattern, and cultural reference seriously, without apology. It pushed back against the idea that those things were excessive or unserious, and that gave me a sense of agency to lean more fully into referencing Indian culture, ornamentation, and design in my own work.

There was a critic back then who kept saying my paintings looked like they were made in the 1970s, which felt, or was at least delivered as, a negative criticism. Understanding Pattern and Decoration helped reframe that. It clarified that what I was drawn to had a lineage, and that lineage carried intention and resistance.

In 2018, while I was in Los Angeles for a show, a friend took me to Craft Contemporary, formerly the Craft and Folk Art Museum, where I encountered the work of Marion Estes. Her work stayed with me. It was confident and materially direct in its use of pattern and handwork, and it reinforced my trust in surface as something that can hold meaning, labor, protection, and belief.

I do not think of my work as belonging neatly to Pattern and Decoration, but I do feel in ongoing conversation with it. The movement opened space for pattern to operate as structure and signal, not just decoration, and that continues to shape how I think about what surfaces can do.

SOS: In the CUE catalogue for Hyphen, Ali Banisadr uses spiritual language to describe your work (“shaman”). How do you relate to that framing—does spirituality feel like a method, subject matter, metaphor, or something else?

NA: I think spiritual language comes up around my work because it is trying to describe an experience rather than a belief or an image. It is less about what the work represents and more about what it does: how it is made, how it is encountered, how it unfolds over time.

If spirituality is understood as an acknowledgment of something deeper than the material world, an attention to inner life, connection, growth, and meaning, then I am comfortable with that language. Making has always been a way for me to process my inner world and stay in relation to something larger than myself.

Repetition plays an important role in that. Building pattern is not just formal for me; it is a way of working through something, closer to how prayer or ritual functions. When I am using materials like turmeric or natural dyes, I am holding substances that carry ancestral and healing associations. The labor and the material become inseparable from the meaning.

There is also something about the act of making that I do not fully understand, and I have learned to trust that. When I am deep in the work, I am often following something rather than directing it. It is not entirely rational. It is closer to listening.

What emerges through my process is often an expression of inner life shaped through material, pattern, and repetition. I do not think of spirituality as subject matter so much as a condition the work passes through. The pieces are meant to hold intention and invite experience rather than declare anything sacred.

SOS: I’m reminded of Witch Hunt at the Hammer and ICA LA (2021–22), which treated “witch” as political/feminist language. Do you see your talismanic motifs (eyes, serpents, protection) operating politically too, or primarily psychologically/spiritually?

NA: It is interesting to be reoriented through Witch Hunt, and I like that the work brought that exhibition to mind. I do not experience those motifs, eyes, serpents, protection symbols, as belonging to a single register. They have always felt slippery to me. Their meaning is not fixed. It changes depending on how and where they are encountered, and at times they function as a kind of faith, charm, or signal.

What Witch Hunt articulated so clearly is how figures associated with intuition, protection, or alternative forms of knowledge become politicized precisely because they sit outside dominant systems of power. I relate to that, not because I am making work about witches, but because talismanic imagery has long been a way of holding agency when other forms of power are not available. Protection symbols exist because something needs protecting, and that is already a political condition.

At the same time, my relationship to these motifs is deeply personal and psychological. They come out of care, vigilance, and inheritance, ways of organizing the inner world. The psychological, spiritual, and political are always overlapping for me, and I am comfortable letting those readings coexist.

SOS: You’ve named artists like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton as touchstones. What do you take from their work that feels urgent now—and what might you intentionally reject or revise?

NA: What draws me to Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton is their seriousness about inner life and their willingness to trust it as a source of form. Abstraction, for them, was not a retreat from meaning. It was a way of engaging perception, belief, and forces that are not immediately visible. That feels urgent now, especially in a moment that values speed and legibility over sustained attention.

I am also deeply connected to their relationship to nature and landscape. Even when it is not explicit, there is a sense of observing and learning from the natural world that runs through their work. Spending time in relationship to landscape has been foundational to how I have developed as an artist, even when it does not show up literally. Nature becomes a way of thinking, not just a source of imagery.

These artists were also important gateways for me. Through them, I began learning about an entire lineage of artists I was never taught about, including Georgiana Houghton, Ithell Colquhoun, Remedios Varo, and Anna Zemánková. Encountering that broader constellation made it clear that this way of working through intuition, symbolism, and inner necessity was never marginal or isolated. It was simply excluded from the narratives I had been given.

What I take from af Klint and Pelton is not a belief system so much as an openness to intuition, to nature, and to letting inner life shape form. What I am careful to revise is the idea of a singular or universal spiritual truth. My work moves through different histories and lived experiences, and I am interested in how abstraction can hold plurality and specificity at the same time.

SOS: I want to learn more about your installation work and sculptures. Personally, I am interested in seeing more of those. What tells you a work needs to become three-dimensional or architectural, rather than staying as a painting? What changes in your decision-making when you’re building a space?

NA: Working in sculpture and installation allows me to engage with tactility, play, and physical proximity in a way that feels essential to how I think. A work usually needs to become three-dimensional when surface alone starts to feel insufficient, when pattern, material, or gesture wants weight, depth, or spatial consequence. Some ideas only become clear through physical encounter.

When I am building a space, my decision-making shifts from composition to relation. I start thinking about how someone approaches the work, how they move through it, where their attention slows down, and how their body feels in relation to materials and forms. Texture, weight, balance, and resistance begin to matter. Pattern becomes architectural. Repetition becomes environmental. Materials start doing physical work rather than symbolic work alone.

Tactility is closely tied to memory for me. Touch is one of the ways memory lives in the body, often before it is articulated in language. Installation and sculpture allow me to engage memory through multiple senses at once, creating a slower and more embodied encounter.

Play also plays a crucial role here. Working in space gives me permission to test, rearrange, and discover through physical interaction. That kind of play is not casual. It is purposeful. It is how I learn what the work wants to become.

SOS: What are you working on right now, and what question is that work trying to answer for you?

NA: Right now, I’m working on a project for Radical Americana (part of Philadelphia250), titled Split Inheritance: Two Dreams of America – Hybrid Histories, Devotional Objects, and the Mythologies of Home.

The project grows out of my family’s layered history. My father, who is Indian, immigrated from Kenya in the 1970s to begin his medical career in the United States, while my mother’s Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors lived and labored in Pennsylvania for generations. That split inheritance has shaped how I think about home, belonging, and what gets carried forward through objects, belief systems, and forms of labor.

I’m developing the work for an exhibition at the Audubon Center at Mill Grove, in collaboration with curator Heather Moqtaderi. In response to the site, I’m creating a contemporary wallpaper inspired by George Harding’s mural at Mill Grove, using the Tree of Life as an organizing structure to weave together narratives of migration, spiritual inheritance, labor, and craft drawn from both Indian and Pennsylvania Dutch traditions.

At its core, the project is asking what role painting and art objects can play in processes of healing. Not healing as a cure, but as attention, continuity, and care. I’m interested in how artworks can function as devotional or grounding objects, capable of holding complex histories and ecological awareness in a way that supports reflection and repair.

SOS: Tell me more about Fjord. When did it start and why? How did you get involved with them?

NA: Fjord started in 2012, when a group of friends had moved to Philadelphia after undergrad and were looking for studio space and ways to stay engaged outside institutional structures.

I was not there at the very beginning, but once I heard about what was happening, it felt aligned in a way that was hard to ignore. I moved to Philadelphia specifically to be part of it. From the start, Fjord was driven by artists making space for one another, testing ideas, supporting work that did not fit neatly into existing categories, and building something sustained through shared labor.

SOS: In the Artblog interview, you describe FJORD’s origin as a DIY rowhouse space, shaped by real estate pressures and gentrification. How has running an artist-run space altered your sense of what institutions do for artists vs what artists can do for and with each other?

NA: When Fjord started, the need was very basic. We were young artists trying to figure out how to live an artist’s life. We needed studios, places to show work, and each other. It was just after the recession, and there was a sense that if we wanted certain conditions to exist, we had to create them ourselves.

Being part of Fjord has shaped how I think about institutions versus artist-run spaces. Institutions can offer stability, resources, and visibility, and those things matter. Artist-run spaces show what is possible through proximity, shared labor, and trust. At Fjord, artists are not just presenting work. They are shaping the conditions under which work can exist.

SOS: It’s been over ten years running. What’s going on with Fjord now?

NA: Fjord is continuing to do what it has always done, which is act as an incubator. We have a strong group of directors who have expanded our network and brought a lot of imagination to the space. Programming decisions are made collectively, with an emphasis on experimentation, sustained dialogue, and supporting artists at different stages of their practice.

We are currently in our third location at 1720 North 5th Street, alongside MIA, a community art space with educational programming, a gallery, and a clay studio. That proximity has made it easier to share resources and labor, which feels very aligned with Fjord’s values.

We recently hosted a successful winter fundraiser, and we are looking ahead to a strong lineup of exhibitions planned for 2026, including a few satellite projects. Our first new show of the year will be a solo exhibition by Zach Hill titled Diorama of a Sunrise Setting, opening January 31, 6–9 p.m., and we’ll follow that with a two-person photo-based exhibition with Ava Hassinger and Christina Kerns.

We’re also intentionally focused on bringing on new members in 2026—if you’re reading this and interested in this kind of artist-led, community-centered work, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more about Natessa’s work: natessa.com/home

Learn more about Fjord: fjordspace.com

Space On Space: What part of Philadelphia did you grow up in? What was it like growing up there?

Gabrielle Constantine: I grew up in Manyunk until I was 12, and then we moved to the suburbs of Lower Merion.

Growing up in Manyunk, there weren’t a lot of neighborhood kids, and my dad ran a butcher shop, so I feel like I grew up in a lot of adult spaces and hung out with people much older than me. I was the kid making cocktails for people at parties. I loved growing up in Manyunk, though it felt like a town within the city. My mom’s best friend lived across the street from us, so we would always head over in our pajamas to go watch a movie with her. I remember seeing the pilot episode of “Lost” there while sitting on the floor, eating a bagged salad and chicken marsala. One of our neighbors fixed up vintage cars and would do really crazy, glassy paint jobs like flames on the side of the car, and so that was always around, too.

We left when I was 12 so I could go to public school at Lower Merion. That was such a culture shock for me. I was coming from an Armenian catholic school that was 100 people from K-8th grade to Lower Merion, which was much bigger, and I was surrounded by much more wealth than I had ever seen before. It felt like the classic high school experience you watch on television. I made really good friends there that I am close with today, and being at such a well-funded school, the art program was insane. I was able to take metal arts classes, and I think that was such a primer for me to become an artist and specifically a sculptor. I do think the change of scenery at such an influential age really primed me for thinking about things in my practice the way that I do in talking about class and whiteness.

SOS: When and where did you learn about art?

GC: I think that my mom and dad both cared about art in the sense that my mom had some photography books on the coffee table. A friend of hers is now a painter in Taos, New Mexico, who taught her a lot about art. But I vividly remember when I was around seven, and I went to take an art class at a community center somewhere, and we were making our own version of Calder’s Circus. To have to be resourceful and imagine what could be something out of nothing really stuck with me my whole life. I will say I still don’t know if the way I think about art is necessarily “proper.” When I say that, I mean that I find that art and craft live within things that don’t get institutional accreditation. Growing up in the restaurant industry all my life, I think I’ve seen people host or have businesses or create homes that feel like art practices to me much more than seeing a Picasso painting or something like that.

SOS: Found materials play a prominent role in your work? What drives your aesthetic sensibilities?

GC: Yes, found materials are extremely important to me on an economic, cultural, and environmental level. I like using things that have existed before me and hold the lineages of past lives. I think my aesthetic sensibilities come from non-art language. I’m really drawn to the way someone adorns their shopping cart that I saw on the SEPTA bus, or a weird window display, or my neighbor sissy’s completely pink living room. I like drawing from the landscapes I’m in and using the materials or discards that make them up.

SOS: Your carpet works are particularly alluring to me. Can you tell me why carpet?

GC: I think of carpet as a great symbol for talking about time through material. I think of Persian rugs sort of as the mother carpet or the original, and everything that falls under talks about the evolution of what has come after. Wall-to-wall carpet was once a status symbol showing off a certain bracket of wealth, and then as time went on, it showed up in more working-class and immigrant households. And even further than that, now millennials feel nostalgia for the material and are reviving it in a way that’s fresh and “cool” again.

SOS: Tell me more about the Table Room?

GC: Table Room was a work I made for my grad thesis at UT Austin. There is a lot of change happening in Austin due to the tech boom there, and the housing landscape has shifted drastically over the past 10 years. I collected a bunch of carpet that was being given away for free off of Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist from houses being demoed. The application of the installation was very intuitive and happened on-site during installation. I embedded photos I had staged and taken into the carpet almost as if little peep holes. My grandmother’s lifelong fiancé was a woodworker and had made some smaller figurines like a vintage car, weird bunnies in orange pajamas, and my dad as a butcher, which was his card holder for the shop. I wanted to follow the non-logic of those three objects and made nine more figurines, like a martini glass or a scary chicken. I paired those objects with family photos of people sitting at tables. I think that this work was the first time I really believed in my material intuition.

It was a piece that wasn’t pointing out something or had a strong idea behind it, but more was pairing things together that I knew carried a lot in terms of craft, aesthetic, and nostalgia. I feel like pairing the family photos, the carpet, and the figurines lets the viewer be immersed in this womb-like cave.

SOS: Does place impact your work?

GC: Yes, definitely, I think the landscape of the place definitely impacts my work. For instance, when I was living in Los Angeles for a short amount of time, I started drying out a lot of fruit for sculptures of mine because of the abundance of fruit needing to be used and eaten. I like being resourceful with my materials, but also gleaning from the landscapes I’m in. I feel like it gives the work a relationship with place and also becomes a time stamp or a scrapbook of how many places, objects, or timelines a sculpture has absorbed.

SOS: Tell me about your current project at RAIR.

GC: My project at RAIR is to make an installation of a bar that will function on occasion. All of the materials that I’m collecting are mostly from domestic demolition and old restaurant equipment. I wanted to make a space that’s an art installation, but also something that people can interact with and be a part of. I’m inviting different friends to come and “host” in the space. The bar is very much patchworked together and uses a lot of found objects that make the space modular and adaptable to the space’s function. This is the first iteration of me trying to merge my cooking/ hosting practice with my installation/sculpture work.

SOS: Where are you making work currently?

GC: I have a studio in the Queens Memorial building in southwest Philly. I had a space there a long time ago, before moving away, and was so happy to come back when I moved back last February. I share it with a friend, and it’s a big old church that has high ceilings and weird quirks to each room.

SOS: Do you go to art openings often in Philly? Where are your favorite places to see art in the city?

GC: I am just starting to get back into going to art openings more. Working on the weekends, I haven’t been able to go to First Friday events as much as I want to. One of my goals going into this year is to integrate myself more into the gallery scene. I do really love Blah Blah and the work that they show there. I am interested in getting more into the pop restaurant scene. I feel like places like Madjal or Scampi have become brick and mortars through doing pop-ups, and that feels like its own version of a gallery to me that I’d like to tap into a bit more.

SOS: I love the idea of restaurants acting as pop-up art spaces. I was recently at LMNO and was so pleased by the work on the walls there. The art elevated the space and added a dimension to an already beautifully designed culinary experience.

What are your biggest challenges as a practicing artist?

GC: I guess doing something that I put so much effort into that doesn’t sustain me financially. Not to say it doesn’t in so many other parts of my life, but I think the more successful you become as an artist doesn’t always equate to fiscal success, especially when you are working in installation-based projects or works that can’t be sold but are more experiential. But that just means it’s a double hustle to figure out how to sustain your practice through other ways.

I think right now it’s at the top of mind because I work at a bar and always have, but I am getting to the age where I might have to pivot and think about a way of having income that’s more sustainable for my life in a long-term way, and that complements my practice fully. I also have been thinking a lot about being an artist lately and how we take on so many different roles for ourselves in our one body, and that can feel overwhelming at times. We are the labor, the PR, the admin, the face, the writer, the caretaker. I think that’s why, especially with the bar project, I’m interested in working in ways that involve community support and collaboration. I like the idea of creating space that invites people to hold and support each other in our practices because being an artist can be isolating at times.

Gabby’s upcoming show for RAIR will take place at Huddle 215 from February 27 to March 20. Location: 338 Brown Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19123

Learn more about Gabrielle Constantine’s work here.

Space On Space: I am curious about whether place plays a role in your work. You were born in Virginia. You currently live in Philadelphia. The spaces you are painting feel very dreamlike. Are they rooted in physical places ever?

Zeinab Diomande: Most of the spaces I tend to depict are a combination of dreamscapes (that I see in my dreams) and real spaces that I know. For example, I often see the house I grew up in, in the Ivory Coast, but since it is not necessarily attached to memories I would like to romanticize, I don’t feel the need to represent that space in my work. I try to steer clear of what I know and invent spaces that I would like my figures to exist in; my goal is to think of what else is possible for these spaces/atmospheres, how they correlate to the figures’ personalities, energies, and likenesses. Generally, very fluid, which can be contradictory to the way they (the figures) are rendered— mostly in great detail, while the background is vague. I use my figures as an entry point into the worlds I try to depict; they lure us because we know they are rooted in something tangible, and they function as portals into the imaginary and vague.

SOS: I’ve seen on your Instagram old archival photographs of family members. I’m specifically referring to the white horse painting, Family enigma. I’m curious if and how ancestry is something you think about, and how you incorporate that into your work.

ZD: Ancestry is something I haven’t always thought of. My figures are visibly Black femmes, like myself, and that was something I play with a lot. Family enigma was born out of a conversation I had with my uncle about my great-great-grandfather: what he was like, who he was, and what my uncle knew about him. I think it was the first time I had ever worked with family archives of that magnitude. I have done pieces of collaged immediate family members, but never that of an imagined archive where I would place myself in a position that reminded me of a family member. It felt like there was more to investigate, but unfortunately, I have not thought much about it after that piece. I think ancestry for me is rooted in the way I think of the things instilled in me, how the people in charge of my care when I was growing up taught me, and I think this shows a lot in my work ethic and the work I end up producing.

SOS: All the subjects are mostly of you, yes? Can you explain why you’ve chosen yourself as subject?

ZD: That is correct. I have painted other people for a very long time, well, drawing mostly. That’s how I started art making; from family to celebrities to fictional characters, you name it. I started painting myself as a way to reconcile the way I view myself and how I deal with how I am perceived in the world. My grandmother did not like pictures and videos. My mother ended up inheriting that from her. I think it is so important to me to archive myself from my own point of view so that I can see what my mind is focusing on through the years: either a certain feature being emphasized, what hairstyle did I want to give myself but didn’t end up doing so I painted it, how my body changes/what I want it to look like. I think it is less accurate than actual photographs, but also more accurate in terms of how your brain processes time.

SOS: The figures in the paintings always seem particularly serious and sometimes sad, or eyes closed, as if they are resting. Can you tell me more about the mood you’re creating and why?

ZD: I think that might be unconscious. Maybe a reflection of how I am perceived/told that I am in real life. I had this professor tell me once jokingly, “You look like what I feel on the inside.” Mind you, this was my neutral face; I was not thinking of anything in particular, just present and observing what was going on around me. I wouldn’t call them sad per se, maybe neutral. The resting part is definitely a reference to these instances of seeing myself sleeping in my dreams, like some sort of lucid dream.

SOS: I read in the Philadelphia Tribune how the works act as a kind of therapy session for yourself. I do notice quite a juxtaposition between the subject’s emotion/facial expression and the fun, playful background. Have you ever considered painting your future self, or a version of yourself post-therapy? What would they look like and feel like?

ZD: I think my current paintings deviate slightly from the inner-child-therapy work that I used to do a lot. I started doing more work, looking at something outside of my reality, despite the figure looking like it is rooted in our time. The backgrounds suggest something that we don’t know yet. We might have a vague sense of it, but it’s a way to suggest a different era, a different way to deal with time and space. Does that make sense?

SOS: Yes. Your work reminds me of Brittney Leeanne Williams with her red self-portrait paintings. Williams works are more immersed bodies in landscapes, where your portraits feel more like dreamscapes, more whimsical, mystical fantasy. There’s a lot of pushing and pulling of the foreground and background, looser brushwork. Sometimes the subject is in focus, and sometimes they’re blurred. Not all the figures are red. Sometimes we see orange, purple, brown, and green. I also enjoy the graphite pieces where all color is removed. I’d love to know more about all of this and your thoughts on it.

ZD: Depending on how much I want the piece I’m working on to reflect that dreamscape, the rendering of the figure will be rendered accordingly. The more blurry the figure, the more vague the piece is going to end up being. I used to paint the figures in different colors to differentiate them, then realized that they are all one and the same, so why not make them one thing but slightly different each time? As of late, I have focused my attention on the red figure, but I also differentiate each red from the last one. The graphite pieces would serve more as studies for larger (or smaller) projects. I think they also have their own individuality that I never thought much of, but now that you point it out, I totally see it.

SOS: I’m seeing repeated imagery of horses of various shades, flowers, stars, smiley faces, etc. I’d love for you to unpack the recurring motifs.

ZD: These motifs, for me, are either decorative or another added layer to the work. For example, I think of stars the way I think of my figures: portals. They guide us into the unknown. Flowers are an indicator of time, transition, and seasons. They are and sometimes aren’t a part of the work. When I need to see them most in the work is when I feel like the figure is reaching a certain point in their journey. Horses are the ancestral creature in my family. Most of my ancestors were nomads, often had horses to navigate the places they went to, so this is my way of remembering and honoring them in my work. I don’t really use the smiley faces anymore, but they were a way to humanize my figures. Give them feelings that weren’t always visible on their faces. Like when someone says, “How are you really?”

SOS: I noticed a few deconstructed paintings by cutting them and weaving parts of them. I’m curious about why this pivot is happening. What brought you to this? It’s quite the departure.

ZD: The woven paintings have been quite an experience. It started with a fibers class, learning the basics of weaving, the over-under-over technique, which I thought I could bring to my painting practice. It’s interesting because it made me think structurally about how the work functions. It’s almost always the same approach, and weaving breaks all of that work and structure. It taught me how to fragment worlds, how to disrupt their pre-existing systems and methodologies. Now my thing is how do I complicate this further, and this is something I will keep asking myself until I have an “Ah-Ha!” Moment with this process.

SOS: Ever thought about installation work, or is canvas your main jam?

ZD: I have done an installation for my undergrad senior thesis show. It was a house where my paintings were sheltered and could look at each other and exist in a place that mirrored the idea of home. It turned out good, but I have bigger plans for this house and would like to make it even more interactive in the near future.

SOS: Can you tell me a bit about what you’re working on for your MFA right now?

ZD: Right now in my MFA program, I am working on expanding these concepts that I am already working with in different mediums. This semester, I am going to be taking a weaving class. I think it will be a good way to think differently about structure and composition, and I’d love to see how that translates into my paintings. I am interested in fragmenting these worlds I create even more, and I think weaving could definitely help with that.

SOS: What’s a dream project you’d love to make?

ZD: A dream project I’d like to make is a remake of that house I talked about earlier, but at a larger-than-life scale. Where people could walk in, take time to absorb. Ideally, I would have video projections and animations on the walls with scores that would’ve been made in collaboration with sound artists. I would love to make this happen for my thesis project, but time might be the issue. If not for my thesis, it will certainly happen in another future.

Emily Logan: Tell me about your art practice.

Avery Moore: The interaction of color and light has always evoked an overwhelming and euphoric satisfaction in me, summoning feelings that are difficult to verbalize. These kinds of inarticulable, emotive interactions are what I strive to achieve through my work.

With limited resources at 18 years old, I often perused the aisles of the grocery store in my college town. Influenced by the colorful and pristine marketing tactics of brands like JELLO, I found myself buying cases of the dessert and truly became engrossed in the potentiality of this unlikely material. Gelatin is a colorless, flavorless substance derived from animal collagen, typically extracted from the connective tissues, skin, and bones of cows or pigs. It is commonly used as a thickening agent in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, and thus is a material that humans interact with daily. I spent the next four years of college experimenting with egg whites, hot water, cold water, isopropyl alcohol, blooming gelatin, and different refrigerator temperatures to get this material to do exactly what I wanted it to do: achieve a combination of light and color that is imbued with ephemerality.

In addition to my material focus on gelatin, I am also deeply drawn to documenting the passage of time. Throughout high school, I conducted annual interviews with the same 10 people, asking them the same questions each year to track their personal growth and evolution from the ages of 14 to 18. During college, I photographed each dorm room I lived in to capture the essence of every place I briefly called home. And for every family member's birthday, I find myself making the quintessential slideshow chronicling their life as they age and evolve. Over time, I found that gelatin does the exact same thing. The pieces mold, the colors fade, and the water eventually evaporates, correlating with relationships in life. Life is ephemeral, I know that one day all those I know will die, my mom will die, I will die, and through my work, I am aiming to preserve what cannot be preserved. Just like gelatin, we are all slowly molding, till we dissolve and become nothing but a moment in time.

EL: You reference Dan Flavin in your About page. Did growing up in Los Angeles, home of the Light and Space movement, have an influence on your work as well?

AM: At a young age, I was enthralled by the work of the 1960s Light and Space movement, led by artists such as Dan Flavin, known for his use of glowing fluorescent light tubes. Flavin’s work explores the complex relationship between light, space, and the viewer’s perception of their environment. Artists like Craig Kauffman and Donald Judd—key figures in this movement—are deeply tied to the identity of Los Angeles, though I didn’t fully grasp that connection until I moved to the East Coast and experienced the stark contrast in architecture and atmosphere.

During my undergraduate studies, I was introduced to artists such as Cy Twombly and Josef Albers, whose work expanded my understanding of abstraction and introduced me to a less figurative, more nuanced use of color. I also found myself captivated by the oeuvre of conceptual artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who investigated themes of impermanence, loss, and viewer participation, most poignantly through his installations, where the audience is invited to take a piece of the artwork (often candy) home with them.

The intersection of these influences, environmental perception, abstract color sensibility, and participatory conceptualism, is where I want my art to stand: a dialogue between space, light, and emotional resonance, grounded in both presence and impermanence.

EL: Any interesting projects you are currently working on, or want to work on?

AM: At the moment, I’m in the process of moving out of my studio in Brooklyn and heading back to Los Angeles. I’m really looking forward to setting up a new space there and seeing how being in that specific city influences my relationship to my work. So much of what I’ve made has been rooted in reflection, and I’m excited to see how my practice evolves in the distinct light of LA, a quality I’ve spent so much time thinking about and have tried to artificially replicate while living on the East Coast.

EL: Currently, you work for David Zwirner Books. What does that entail?

AV: For the past two years, I’ve been working on the books team at David Zwirner in New York, where I manage the bookstore and oversee order fulfillment. This role has given me a unique perspective on the inner workings of the commercial art world, particularly how art book publishing, exhibition-making, and audience engagement intersect at a major gallery. I’ve gained valuable experience in logistics, customer service, and curatorial support through books, all while staying closely connected to ongoing conversations in contemporary art.

I’ve learned so much in this role and have found a supportive community of people who are also pursuing creative careers. This experience has broadened my understanding of what it means to be a working artist today and how creative work can exist within both commercial and conceptual spaces.

EL: I'm such a big fan of your mom, the owner of Little Flower Candy Co. What was it like growing up with a mom who ran a candy store? I want to hear more about how your relationship with your mom influences your practice.

AM: Growing up with a mom who ran a candy business had a profound impact on my work, she’s the reason I began using gelatin in the first place. My mom started her business in our kitchen, and I can still vividly picture the metro shelves lined with buckets of orange Knox gelatin. That image stayed with me, and when I got to college, the first thing I put in my studio was a container of gelatin. It’s a material that makes me feel close to her. Candy also has such a specific color palette, soft pastels and bright, artificial hues, that has heavily influenced my visual language.

As a child raised by a single parent, my greatest fear was that something might happen to that parent. When I moved away from home, working with gelatin became my way of staying connected to my mother. As strange as it may sound, I felt like I could understand her better while making those gelatinous sculptures. The process requires method, patience, and precision and it gives you a lot of time to think. In that space, I found a quiet closeness to her, and a deeper understanding of where I come from.

EL: Can we talk about your experience growing up in Altadena? How are you holding up with the recent fires impacting your family?

AM: When I was 14, my mom moved us from Mt. Washington (a centrally located neighborhood in Los Angeles) to Altadena. My friends called it the countryside. Without a driver's license, I started going on long walks through the neighborhood. That’s where I developed my love for walking and architecture. Altadena had such a unique mix of people, homes, and landscapes. It felt unlike anywhere I had ever been.

During the pandemic, I took these long, almost meditative 10-mile walks just to pass the time in quarantine. It was during that period that I discovered the hidden Neutra house, walked alongside peacocks, and even once went an extra mile to avoid crossing paths with a bear. Altadena became a really special place to me. A setting that quietly shaped my adolescence and gave me a deep appreciation for my surroundings.

I still can’t quite believe the Eaton Canyon fire happened. Every time I visit home and see the damage, it becomes more real. All of the visual markers from my walks are gone and it becomes really confusing the place where I am. It was a place full of meaning, and while I know it will be again, I’ll never stop feeling heartbroken over what was lost. I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in such a special environment, one that deeply influenced how I see and move through the world.

Learn more at averymoore.com

William Moreno: I studied business in college and worked in the corporate arena several years–mostly in marketing and communications. At some point I wanted to make a change–perhaps my upbringing influenced me–I ended up managing a commercial gallery and later directing a museum. In many respects, museums operate similarly to businesses without the profit motive. The daily financial and personnel management was familiar to me. The challenge was balancing numerous constituencies: staff, board of directors, the surrounding communities, members, and fundraising–which is a constant. I eventually left the museum field and decided to embark on art, management and consulting, and executive coaching. I think I worked with over 100 non-profits and leaders, both arts and non-arts. They all had common challenges with board interactions and fundraising; nothing really changes. I also advise collectors on acquiring art–these tend to be very focused and shorter term. My goal is not to direct collectors to certain artists but it is to build on their personal collecting interests.

EL: I first learned about you in the Artillery article about the Cheech Marin Museum in Riverside, CA. Other than writing the article and interviewing Marin, did you play any part in establishing the museum?

WM: No. I did, however, know Cheech Marin from his involvement on the board of directors at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum and was aware of his impressive collection. I support and laud what he and the city of Riverside have created; it’s an important watershed institution for artists and Latino culture in greater Southern California.

EL: I noticed a painting of you as a child by your father on your website. Your father–Anthony Moreno–was an artist and went to ArtCenter College of Design. Can you share more about that painting and what it was like having a father who was an artist growing up?

WM: The painting does mean a lot to me–our dad was a hero to all my siblings. He emerged from WWII as a Purple Heart recipient having lost most of his left arm. Thankfully, it was not his drawing arm. He always had a knack for art, and so, via the GI Bill, he attended ArtCenter and graduated in 1950. He was a rare student in that there were no Latino students save one or two. He went on to become an art director in a number of prominent advertising agencies and did quite a bit of work for Parsons. Most were commercial projects as well as identity work for Palm Springs Hotels and other brands including some bodybuilding magazines with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is an interesting story.

He had a small garage studio and, in what spare time he had, he’d paint and draw landscapes and portraits of his kids. I don’t think we thought much of it–it was just a natural extension of family life–all artworks in the home were his. Visitors really coveted them. He also made custom birthday and Christmas cards every year. But he never sold or marketed any of his art. The fact that he did this with one arm really impressed friends; he was extremely facile with it. He also loved music–jazz, classical, and light opera–as well as reading. He and my mother loved the performing arts and regularly attended programs at the Music Center. He belonged to a book-of-the-month club, so we all got the benefit of a small library with contemporary fiction and non-fiction. I think I read Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring at 10. That family experience gave me a sense that art was not something elusive, exclusive, or elite–it was a natural expression of human and family experience–a perspective that influences me to this day.

EL: Your father’s work was acquired by the Smithsonian. I’d love to learn more about the process of getting his work into the Smithsonian.

WM: That was a case of timing and serendipity. When my dad passed, he left behind a large archive of commercial works, as well as his paintings, sketches, drawings, and ephemeral material from the 1950s through the 1980s. It sat in a spare bedroom for years until I started organizing it. I submitted one of his paintings for a Smithsonian open call exhibit and although they didn’t take the entry, it led to a referral to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The curator we worked with oversaw a very specific section of the museum that collected art of the commercial art world. She indicated an interest, and we flew to D.C. for an in-person meeting. I took my brother and nephews. It was quite fun, and the curator could not have been more gracious. She wanted nearly all of my dad’s archives, which filled a gap in their collection. I felt his work fit more directly into the narrative of American history as opposed to an ethnocentric institution, which can often feel isolated. The Smithsonian also has a service where any family member or scholar can make an appointment to view the materials.

EL: With the recent Executive Order to cut IMLS funding, how do you think this will affect the art world and museum work?

WM: It’s hard to predict, however, the loss of any funding can be a major detriment. Specifically the Japanese American Museum is at risk of losing $2 million this fiscal year.1 The message it sends is tragic. A civil society should support arts and culture.

EL: Any artists you’d like to give a shout out to?

WM: My big current focus is Outsider artists and I have been working with the Estate of Martin Ramirez in New York.

EL: Any interesting projects you are currently working on that you’d like to share?

WM: I’m really focused on writing, art reviews aside, I’ve written a number of artists' monographs and other separate projects.

William Moreno is a Los Angeles native and an independent art advisor, writer, and curator. He was previously the Executive Director of The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, and the founding Director of the Claremont Museum of Art. He is a consultant for the Los Angeles County Arts Department. William’s past board service includes Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the California Association of Museums. He has served on the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowships, NALAC Fund for the Arts, California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artists Fellowships, portfolio reviewer for PhotoAlliance and the Los Angeles Art Association, and panelist for Legacy Artists Foundation Award.

wmcontemporary.com

Based in Atascadero, California, Allie Mount's practice often combines found natural objects with manmade materials arranged to be photographed or constructed into wall sculptures. Her forms and approach focus on the relationship between what is composed by hand and what has organically been shaped by nature. Her recent show, Presentations, was on view at Cruise Control Contemporary in Cambria, CA.

Emily Logan: Please describe your art practice.

Allie Mount: My work is grounded in the simple act of being in the world—observing, feeling, and recognizing the beauty around me. Everything I experience feeds into what I eventually create.

In the studio, I allow myself the freedom to respond to what’s on my mind, what I’ve been carrying with me—whether that’s the movement I feel in my body or the stillness I find in nature.

My process is spontaneous. I engage with materials, sometimes with humor, sometimes with vulnerability. It’s a way for me to channel what it feels like to be in this body, in this world, in this moment.

EL: What motivates you to begin creating a new sculpture?

AM: I keep a regular practice of being in the studio, which means I’m always surrounded by items I’ve collected over time—objects that spark curiosity and inspiration. The initial motivation comes from giving myself the freedom to explore without pressure to create a finished product. Instead, it’s about responding to the materials and allowing the process to unfold naturally.

As I work, a conversation emerges between the materials and myself. I begin to recognize how they want to be positioned, composed, and altered. Gradually, the work begins to take shape, and I start to see what I’m creating as a sculpture.

I’m constantly inspired by the beauty I observe in the world and feel compelled to respond to it. This could be anything—from intricate patterns in nature or even the quiet moments of daily life. Sculpture is a way for me to have a dialogue with that beauty, to reflect it back in a tangible form.

The world at its smallest scale behaves so differently from what we experience in our everyday lives. I think about the way particles move, how things can exist in multiple states at once, or how forces interact in ways we can’t always see. These ideas make me think about the impermanence and interconnectedness of everything, which I find inspiring when it comes to creating sculpture.

The fluidity, the unpredictability, the constant shift in states—these concepts resonate with how I approach materials in the studio. I’m not always in control, and there’s beauty in that uncertainty. It's like I’m creating something physical out of a world that's not always as solid or predictable as we might think.

EL: Historically you were a photographer, when did you begin exploring sculpture as a medium within your art practice? Why sculpture?

AM: I was photographing still lifes I created from found and natural objects, which led me to move into sculpture. Initially, the impermanence of the compositions was part of the joy of the process: I would collect items that sat in harmony together, photograph them, and then break down the components back to their individual elements. Soon, the physicality of the process began to work its way into more and more of my art. I found inspiration in the tactile and how touch and feel could inform my expression.

In photography, I was engaged with form, light, and composition, and in sculpture, I can engage with all of that plus the element of space. Sculpture allows me to give materiality to the ideas and feelings I was already exploring in my photography.

I find that making sculptures allows me to be fully in the moment, to feel the materials, and to respond to the process in ways that are immediate and intuitive. I’m expanding the conversation I was already having with the world around me but in a new language.

EL: How does the work in Presentations reflect our consciousness?

AM: In Presentations, the work is about consciousness and the power of observation. To me, the closest way we can understand what this world is about is through our attempts in both art and science to seek truth. Both disciplines, in their own ways, are engaged in uncovering the nature of existence, and they often share a common goal: understanding reality.

One of the fascinating things we know from science is that existence itself is dependent on the observer. The world, as we experience it, only exists because we are conscious of it. This idea—that consciousness is the lens through which we perceive the world—drives the core of Presentations. The work reflects this relationship between the observer and what is observed.

I want to emphasize the quiet power in simply being a witness. In Presentations, I explore how the act of seeing—of truly observing—can be a transformative experience in itself.

We don't always need to do anything to engage with the world; sometimes, just being present and acknowledging what’s around us is enough.

The work in this series is about the act of witnessing, the deep engagement with the moment, and recognizing that seeing is, in itself, a form of knowing.

So, in this sense, Presentations is about recognizing the value of consciousness, and the role of the observer in shaping the world. It’s an invitation to slow down and realize that our awareness, our ability to see and be present, has profound power.

EL: What’s next?

AM: It’s exciting to be back in the studio. During Presentations, I took a silversmithing class, which has opened up a new realm in terms of incorporating metalworking techniques into my sculptures. I’m combining some precious metals with found materials, and enjoying the exploration of how they can interact and complement each other.

The pieces in Presentations had a strong emphasis on light and shadow and I’m continuing to pursue that theme. I’m working on some pieces inspired by tracking the movements of the sun, much like how a plant will adjust to capture light throughout the day. I’ve long had a fascination with heliostats and this project combines that interest with my artistic practice, creating what I hope will be an interesting intersection between art, science, and light.

To learn more about Allie Mount’s work, check out her website.