From "All Walks of Life":

On the occasion of our presentation of All Walks of Life, a vibrant group exhibition on view at our Hong Kong gallery though January 18, 2024, we spoke with each of the seven artists featured in the show: Anthony Cudahy, Katja Farin, Aubrey Levinthal, Laurent Proux, Daisy Sheff, Sarah Slappey, and Fabian Treiber. In these new interviews, the artists discuss their formal and conceptual interests as well as their new and recent paintings on view in the show. Meditating on the nuances and subjectivities of everyday life, this ongoing exhibition, organized by independent curator independent curator William Zhao, offers a focused look at contemporary painting while also exploring what it means to be an individual, both bodily and spiritually, in the present moment.

So, as I mentioned, the position of the hands in my painting in Pace’s exhibition—which is of my boyfriend Alex—is important to the composition, and I also wanted there to be this branch of a tree that’s arching over Alex. I think that branch creates this very stable, protective composition. Everything is kind of nestled in and held, I think, in a very tender way.

I’m interested in having an open-endedness to my work. I’m thinking through really specific life events or ideas or concepts and trying to find a way to narrate them. There’s this sort of tightrope walk between not want to be so specific that there’s only one reading of a work, but also wanting a distinct feeling or effect or mood to come through. I explore the edges of narrative in subtle ways like playing with composition or the way paint is applied—those muddied spaces that have so much potential for meaning.

There’s also ambiguity with gender in my paintings. As a trans person, that’s very important to me, and, in my work, gender is an open-ended experience. It doesn’t have to be so tight and closed. There’s a lot of ambiguity and anxiety within the figures themselves—their poses and faces can be sort of dissociative. It’s like they’re all kind of lost within their own selfhood, or their selfhood is moving around them and they’re not connecting to it. There’s always an anticipatory feeling in the work, like the other shoe could drop at any moment. I don’t think of my work as depicting reality—I’m depicting feelings, and my use of color really plays into those depictions of emotions and a sense of un-realness in the scenes.

I create narratives in my paintings that aren’t bound to a real storyline or timeline—they’re suspended in space a bit. The works are kind of like narrative puzzles, and the viewer is tasked with figuring things out and putting all the different details together. They’re kind of like stage sets with scenes forming and unfolding in real time through the actions of these flattened figures. That idea of external performance versus internal life is a central concern of my figurations.

When I’m painting, I start with a basic idea or basic drawing, and then I go from there. Over time, I realize there’s even more meaning in that initial idea—it builds throughout the process of making the work. In Lost Keys, which is in the Pace exhibition, the figure is running away from a fire, but it’s unclear if they started the blaze or if they’re escaping it. It’s this activated fight or flight response in which the figure is maybe thinking, “I’m burning bridges and I’m not even going to look back. I don’t even care anymore. I’m moving on.” When I was making Missed Shot, my other painting in the show, I was thinking about this idea of self-medicating and leaving your physical body as a result. There’s a sense of euphoria but also of looming danger before the dart is thrown by the blindfolded figure. The dynamics between the figures in that painting are also really interesting to me—who’s paying attention to what’s going on around them and who isn’t.

Living in Philadelphia, industrial grays and silvery shimmers are the backdrops for the experiences I have, so those colors have really made their way into my palette. I always gravitate towards these kinds of grounding neutrals, and I think that helps make small moments of brightness sing—like in Campus (Snow), there’s a bright pink moment that emerges within this composition of mostly neutrals. That’s something that I continue to find interesting and challenging in making a painting.

I do feel like my paintings often have something that feels a little off. Generally, they all tend to be about a person who lives in their own head a lot and who has to reconcile that tendency with also existing in the physical world. I’ve been trying to make paintings about solitude as opposed to loneliness—about the different ways that being a person can feel in both interior and exterior worlds.

I don’t set out to make narrative paintings at all, but I’ve always been drawn to figuration because it lets you wonder about those pictured and their surroundings. I like that curiosity, though I don’t want to tell one story. I want the works to be open and not so linear, without closing off the possibility for links between different compositions.

I like that there’s some variety in the temperatures and moods of the three paintings I’m exhibiting at Pace in Hong Kong, and this group of works also kind of exemplifies that idea of living in your own head. I’ve made a lot of work about my own spaces and my experiences in my house, and Night TV, which shows a woman at the edge of a bed, is sort of representative of that. The other two paintings reflect my more recent interest in depicting shared but still intimate spaces, like schools or airplanes. You’re more aware of yourself, in a certain way, in those kinds of places. You can almost invent a different, very controlled version of yourself for a few hours.

The two paintings I’m showing at Pace in Hong Kong—Constantine’s Dream II and The Storm II—are very different sizes and they were made in different ways, but they share the same subject: the nuances and ambiguities of human relationships. The landscapes in both are simple and sparse, a kind of desert environment. We see the figures in each of the works from ground level, and it’s implied that there’s a lot going on beyond the edges of the canvases.

These works are inspired by the colossal remains of a statue of the emperor Constantine in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, next to which Philip Guston poses in a well-known photograph, and Piero della Francesca’s fresco The Dream of Constantine in the Tuscan city of Arezzo. With The Storm II, I was also interested in interplays of lovers’ hands, attracting and repelling each other, that I observed on the subway.

In both works, there’s a domineering and disquieting figure whose face is unknown to the viewer. As viewers of these paintings, we find ourselves looking from a child’s point of view. The figures on the ground may seem vanquished, yet, in each of the works, there is contact between hands, feet, and calves. This silent, ambivalent gesture raises several questions: Are the hands pleading for mercy? Are they accepting their fate? Or is this an expression of love?

I read a lot and I watch a lot of movies, so a lot of the things that inspire me have characters and narratives. Movement between figuration and abstraction is important in my work. I also really lean into color blocking, patterning, and other decorative and design aspects.

I’m definitely attracted to mythological and fantastical characters, and I always like when the world becomes magical through human eyes. I love the freedom to make connections between shapes and colors, which leads me to find faces and other recognizable forms in unlikely places.

I made the four paintings I’m showing at Pace in Hong Kong at different times. There’s a lot of mixed media in these works and a lot of surface exploration going on, so those formal connections between them just kind of happened naturally. You’ll see oil, glitter, embroidery, chains, and other materials in these pieces, so I think there’s a consciousness of the fabric-ness of painting that cuts across all four of my works in the exhibition.

Our own conceptions of our bodies are influenced by external forces, so my interest in distortion and contortion is kind of paying homage to the surrealness—or unreality—of what a human body actually is. It’s more interesting to me to explore how a body feels than how it appears.

I also really like the way a painting can transform as you look at it. You can think you’re seeing one thing, and then, the closer you examine it, the work becomes something totally different. You have that switch of emotion between desire and repulsion or vice versa, and that landscape of transition is so fascinating to me. I think that’s also connected to how it feels to be a woman—being delighted by that experience or frustrated at other times. So, in my work, there’s this soft, supple flesh that the viewer maybe wants to reach out and touch, but that flesh is often being pierced or disrupted by these instruments of femininity like pins, needles, and razors.

In the exhibition with Pace in Hong Kong, I’m showing two paintings: the smaller one, Emerald Strike, really meditates on body piercing. I have my ears pierced, so I’m a participant in this culture as much as a viewer. But if you extend that practice that we think of as decorative, you can see the violence in it, and that idea appears in my work over and over and again.

The other painting in the show, Carpet of Needles (如坐针毡), is a bathtub scene, and I made this work hoping that my experience growing up in the American South might resonate with audiences in Hong Kong. I did some research on Chinese proverbs and found one about sitting on a carpet of needles—the needles are small enough that you don’t really notice them until you move. So, it’s about this feeling of slight but constant discomfort. I think that idea can relate to something physical—like a bobby pin going the wrong way or a bra that’s a little too tight—or something less tangible, like a sense of danger or disquiet in everyday experiences of the world. I’ve depicted pins and needles in my works in the past, so I really understood the feeling and the message of that proverb. I’ve also been making these bathtub paintings for a little while, but never in this form. I wanted the hair to spell out “carpet of needles,” and I wanted viewers in Hong Kong to know that I’m speaking to them personally with this work.