In May, A.i.A. visited Shechet on site at Storm King as she prepared for her show to open. She talked about approaching her work with a sense of humor and sassiness, and accepting the fact that mystery is always part of her process.

Video credits include:

Directed, Produced and Edited by Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography Alan Lee Jensen
Second Cam Op Joseph Kickbush
Sound Nil Tiberi
Arlene Shechet Fabrication photos by David Schulz
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

In May, A.i.A. visited Shechet on site at Storm King as she prepared for her show to open. She talked about approaching her work with a sense of humor and sassiness, and accepting the fact that mystery is always part of her process.

Video credits include:

Directed, Produced and Edited by Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography Alan Lee Jensen
Second Cam Op Joseph Kickbush
Sound Nil Tiberi
Arlene Shechet Fabrication photos by David Schulz
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

In April, Art in America visited Sikander at Pace Paper Studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she was preparing a new series of works on paper after sending other pieces off to the Palazzo Van Axel in Venice, where her retrospective is currently on view. While she added layers to artworks in various stages of preparation, Sikander talked about distilling ideas from around the globe, drawing as a navigational tool, and engaging history without glorifying it. Watch Sikander at work in the video above, and read more about her in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Eleanor Heartney

Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

Sometimes, property owners add devices that look like medieval contraptions to them. I exhibit these spikes as sculptures, and usually place them at roughly the same level as the standpipe they were originally installed on. Each work in the series takes a different form according to the aesthetic decisions of the developer who commissioned it or the fabricator who made it. The sculptures make the removal visible, since they’re not meant to be noticed. But the work is also about the growing series of absences across the city, and the increased possibilities for loitering.

That means I make most of my works by walking around in the streets, then use my studio as a space to store objects or try out installations. I’m invested in highlighting the ways that forces like real estate development, or the ongoing privatization of the city, continuously encroach on different aspects of daily life. I try to find moments where those forces become visible.

I’m looking for objects that are physical forms of policing. Another example is planters that are strategically placed to prevent access to areas where there might be shelter or a covering, such as under awnings. Often, they’re not even filled with plants but, instead, bricks or cement, making them too heavy to move. I’ve been removing some of these structures and reconstituting them as actual planters, growing things inside them. For a 2022 show at Artists Space in New York called “Everything is Common,” I placed three of these planters in the windowsills and grew parsnips and carrots in them. Those reference this group of 17th-century radical Christians in England known as the Diggers. The Diggers would grow edible crops on other people’s property, since they believed that everything is communal under their god. —As told to Emily Watlington

Video Credits include:

Director/Editor/Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

Additional Footage by Tomas Abad, Karla Coté/NurPhoto, and Mastershot via Getty

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

I start by mixing a palette, and as I mix, I get an idea of what the painting will be. I’ll have a general sense of the palette within a few minutes: they usually involve interactions between earth tones and bright, saturated colors. But I spend a lot of time figuring out the light and contrasts, and a palette can take a sharp turn quickly if it’s just not feeling right.

Lately I’ve been starting with the background, then working my way to the surface of my paintings. I like making the background look like it was the last thing that happened, even though it was first. I’m often building up thick paint, then wiping it away, and the wipes leave marks. But I change the process up from painting to painting—I always want to stay surprised and spontaneous.

I mostly draw imagery from everyday experiences: memories, places I’ve lived, things I see on walks. Sometimes, I’ll see something I liked in one painting, and then I’ll try it again in the next one.

For Convergence (2023), I started off building up layers of dark acrylic dye washes. But I couldn’t figure out the space at all: it was too abstract and looked almost underwater. Eventually, I flipped the canvas over and started painting on the back. You see the stains from the reverse side at the top, and at the bottom, I painted over them in oil. The harsh horizon line helps both parts feel like they’re in the same space, even though, material-wise, they’re very different.

I keep paint skins in my studio, made from paint I took off old paintings. I’m often holding them up to canvases to see what needs them. Sometimes I’ll throw in paint from another palette. I almost want it to feel like you could just peel it off.

Usually, I’m working on four or five paintings at a time. It’s helpful to bounce between works. I can finish a painting in one day, and usually I find those to be the most successful—it means I got the full idea out and I don’t have to go back in and fix it, which sometimes makes me feel on the verge of “designing.” For me, it’s always about spontaneity. —As told to Emily Watlington

Over the past decade, Simpson has produced a veritable pantheon of clay beings that honor Pueblo traditions while anticipating an upcoming apocalypse. Bearing such hallmark signifiers as slit eyes, absent limbs, and desert tones, these figures serve as characters in a quiet but profound epic that begins in the Southwest—in northern New Mexico, to be exact—but whose relevance extends into the beyond.

Check out a recent Art in America feature about Simpson by Lou Cornum from our November 2022 issue.

Watch the full video above or on the official Art in America YouTube channel.

Video Transcript

My name is Rose B. Simpson. The exhibition is called “Road Less Traveled,” and it’s at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. “Road Less Traveled” is me challenging the very things that I took for granted or the processes that seemed easy and often are unhealthy. And if I take some time and witness what’s possible, I can transform my own reality and hopefully, by default, help other people, too.

The work represents my own journey, whether it’s psychological investigation, a new spiritual awareness, or it’s a very practical emotional or psychological space that I need to inhabit in order to transform my reality. The work offers me a reflection of what’s possible and I make it and I visualize it, and then it becomes… a thing. And then I get to witness this thing, and from it, I get to grow. Every single mark on the surface of these pieces means something. Either they’re stars, they’re X’s, which represent protection, or they represent tracks or days or the marking of time or the process around journey. When I use things like beads in a line or I put a line of markings in a row, it’s a specific number, like seven generations, or it’s seven directions, or it represents the months of the year. To me, it represents the process of going somewhere. So, the journey that we’re on.

Video Credits

Featuring: Rose B. Simpson
Producer and Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Music: Jakariwing
Copy Edits: Emily Watlington
Additional Edits: Jacob Amorelli

“Hot Mess Formalism” can be seen as more a sampling than a survey per se—not least because of the aforementioned ephemeral quality of some of her work. The five large-scale installations in the exhibition are not of that sort, but have been loaned from various collections. The earliest piece on view dates to 1983, and the latest, 91 BCE ⌛ Not So Good for Emperors, was commissioned by the Phoenix Museum of Art for the show’s debut in fall 2017. Displayed on big tables are dozens of Pepe’s “Votive Moderns” (1994–): engaging little assemblages, each with a distinct personality, that combine art materials and industrial castoffs. Throughout the show, in works large and small, Pepe combines architectural nerve, material dexterity, and an appealing, awkward choreography.

Beginning as a thin trickle of blue cord in a stairwell, 91 BCE rises into a corridor and two rooms on the second floor, morphing into stretches of metal chain mail and tan-colored crocheted patches. Some portions rest against walls; others proliferate into a room-blocking chaos of stuttering lines and shapes. Such works feel like drawings in space, as much sketched as constructed—an intentional effect; and a large group of gouaches (wonky geometric abstractions alluding to urban infrastructure) offers a pictorial counterpart to these three-dimensional acrobatics. In a documentary video playing at the show, Pepe discusses some of the ideas behind 91 BCE. In the title year, as alluded to by the chain mail in the work, violent uprisings against ruling powers occurred in both Italy and China. The work demonstrates Pepe’s typical tough attitude, itself a form of resistance: deeply feminist and queer in sensibility, she challenges the dominance of monumental form with patient, accretive labor.

A veneration of women’s work has undergirded Pepe’s structures from the start. In Women Are Bricks: Mobile Bricks (1983), triangular bricks mounted on ceramic rollers are arranged in a grid on a stretch of found carpet. They could almost be toys, but for the rough, industrial quality of the brick and the rigor of seriality and gridding. Here we see Pepe’s origins as a ceramist and a devotee of the Post-Minimalists, particularly Eva Hesse. Pepe speaks often of her post–Vatican II Catholic childhood, and of being raised by industrious Italian American parents, who owned a restaurant in New Jersey; we see homages to these milieux in the imposing Second Vatican Council Wrap (2013), a quasi-figurative installation incorporating metallic thread and a fragile baldachin, and in a video showing her hands rolling meatballs and placing them in a grid. The ubiquitous shoelaces refer to her cobbler grandfather, the crocheting to her mother’s craft. Still, Pepe pushes her tributes to an extreme, her obsessive energy transforming the most ordinary materials into the great “hot mess” that is their strength and appeal.

The video, María Elena, combines various filming techniques: panning sequences and fixed camera shots; aerial views (of putty-white terrain, of geometrically arranged mounds of powdery minerals or drying beds, the latter acid yellow and lime green) and closely framed details (an ear, a llama’s matted back, old shoes). We see mining processes, with tracts of land laced with charges exploding and heaps of white material being generated. We see machines, but rarely their operators. Flies move on the surface of water, stars hang in the sky, all accompanied by a soundtrack of ambient noises such as walkie-talkie conversations, plane-engine humming, and instrument beeping. An enigmatic figure draped from head to foot in a reflective metallic cloth appears three times, unsettling the viewer.

It is interesting to compare this work with Turkish artist Ali Kazma’s video Mine (2017), which focuses on the abandoned remains of another Atacama mine, one that, after it had ceased operations, was used as a concentration camp under Pinochet’s regime. Smith’s video likewise shows ruined buildings—an earthquake hit the town in 2007—but otherwise is very different. While Kazma’s work depicts its site soberly and quietly, allowing viewers time to form judgments, María Elena is often restless, occasionally frantic, and filled with frustrating images: blurry footage of a polo game, for instance, and cropped shots of people with their heads outside the frame.

The paintings on view were rendered with various materials (oil, acrylic, masking fluid, encaustic, pencil) on MDF or paper. Two diptychs and a triptych, each titled Bocetos para María Elena (Sketches for María Elena), were shown as one frieze. Subjects focused on in the video dotted its surface, as did lists of statistics (of what was not made clear) and train station names. Lines tracing from panel to panel suggested those on transportation maps. The work read as a spare sketch of how a barren region is prospected: the exploration, the building of its infrastructure, the movement of people. Another work, Diagrama 82, was a map of Chile with the country’s outlines carved into the panel support and the mining areas highlighted in orange. 

Smith’s video certainly casts a dubious eye toward the historical exploitation of the “new world” for natural resources. Yet it also, more urgently, asks the viewer to consider what role industrialized mining should play in current and future conceptions of property and in relation to our environmental responsibilities. Smith observes how the earth’s crust in María Elena is still being blown apart to release valuable saltpeter, and she looks, too, to the stars, as if to ask where our hunger for resources will take us. Her study offers the viewer no easy, omniscient perspective, but instead a disjointed collection of insights to decipher. But one thing is certain: it is as much a warning of things that might come as it is a portrayal of anachronistic industrial operations.