I was asked to come here when Hauser & Wirth originally started the gallery a few years ago and it was always something that I kind of wanted to do when I initially visited I thought it was a beautiful place I didn't know much about it honestly but I thought – and my work is always dealt with, you know the idea of escapism and in a sense it felt like an opportunity to think about how one would escape and how one would be in a distant place and how my work would function outside of the comfort zone that I become accustomed to in my own studio. Historically for me I've been hesitant to do residencies because I do have so much happening in my studio that I think functions as a result of how I work there and so it's interesting for me to put myself in a place that seemingly seems more comfortable because of how quiet it is and how different it is and how much more time even potentially I would have to work in this space as opposed to the commute to my studio in the city and the negotiation of kind of the urban condition as part of how my practice functions. But you know it's more complicated when you don't have the things that you're more familiar with when you're working and so it's been an interesting challenge but one that I think is in a lot of ways been quite rewarding It's the green and then it'd have to be like a throw you know something a tad more aggressive Maybe even a directional thing? I think the first room in the gallery which they call the Threshing Barn for me was an interesting space to work because it doesn't have, you know the traditional white cube which I think can be a crutch for a lot of artists when we become accustomed to these quite simple white spaces that we're negotiating is, you know, quite easily interpreted boxes. That space is very different in that there are these kind of older brick walls – I think the building is maybe from the 17th century or earlier – I'm not even sure – but it does present a different set of challenges and I think that the way that that work – the still cube works function there is it's quite interesting because it allows kind of the organic nature of the materials that inhabit those cubes to I don't know, in a way kind of reconnect with their wildness and so that's that's been fun to see. I thought about making them as a single work at one point and then I kind of made them into four separate autonomous things and gave them kind of a different agency than I think that they've had in the past where they lived almost primarily as kind of larger installations and more kind of hulking moments but in this they become almost more huggable in a way almost like you can get your hands around them and you can navigate them and the size of your body is not completely dissimilar from the size of the sculptures and I think that that kind of gives the audience of people who are viewing them a chance to negotiate you know, their scale in a way where it's not overbearing and that's been new for me – in a new way of working one that I think is really productive for this exhibition. I created a body work called Anxious Audiences. Most Anxious Audiences were meant to talk about our collective anxiety – an anxiety that I think so many of us felt around, you know, the upcoming election as well as kind of the spirited movement Black Lives Matter a lot of kind of the global nationalism that seems to become so prevalent in the world today and in politics. So many of these things I think were causing so many of us us to have a tremendous amount of anxiety on top of just the nature of being a New Yorker and the anxiety that I kind of inherently feeling that experience alone. And so in this exhibition I kind of started to work through some drawing. The Anxious Audience drawings lead to another body of work and it's difficult for me to locate it exactly how the second body of work came to be, but this is a body work that I call The Clowns and it was really post the the US election that I started making them and I'd made a one of the anxious men of larger anxious man face and for some reason it didn't feel like it exactly captured what my emotions were at that particular period and the process of burning it off – because it's made of black soap and wax and they can quite easily be burned off with a roofing torch – I started seeing the face kind of melt and kind of witnessing that made me realize that that was the emotion that I was trying to capture and I wasn't exactly sure who the characters were that I was trying to capture – if it was myself or if it was us or if it were the people who I imagine were in the process of making our world a less desirable place to live. And so the title The Clowns borrows from a song by Charles Mingus that has a kind of spoken word component to it about a clown who is having some trouble navigating his career and he goes through these really complicated stages and it felt a lot like these paintings that I was making and so the title is brought from that. There's also something interesting about clowns in that you can never tell what emotion that they're actually having because they have this painted on smile but they could be miserable if I were to tell people that a clown is scary everyone would agree If I were to tell people that clowns were happy everyone would agree It's kind of a plethora of emotions that I think we can relate to a clown is something I think I was trying to have related to these two these particular images as well and so I see kind of the clowns is almost a graduation from the Anxious Audiences or from the Anxious Men and to this kind of more complicated more neurotic and in some ways more dystopian understanding of the world that we're living in today. You know it's interesting, I think quite a few new things have happened here I was working with color before I came here I worked with color for my last exhibition and something I've been exploring for many years and trying to adapt to trying to learn how to employ borrowing images the way I have been for the last few years as opposed to making images has been something that's in a lot of ways graduated in this exhibition. I've included these African masks which are just kind of these searched-for masks and it's interesting how they relate to things that I've made in the past and it's interesting for me how they relate to my own story one of the questions that I kind of asked myself is who has the right to employ cultural images and how do those cultural images function in the hands of an artist like myself as opposed to in the hands of another artist. And me not being African but you know, diasporicly being of African descent I think to myself oh I have the ability to employ these images and for some reason I have some sort of ownership of these images but in a way I'm not positive I have anymore ownership of these kinds of images than anyone else. I think that there's kind of this question in kind of modern art around how culture functions and how narrative functions when you're using images that both are part of kind of the language that we all understand as well as part of kind of a cultural kind of complexity and for me that's been an interesting thing to consider while also thinking more simply about the idea of masking and the mask and covering and how that relates to ideas of escapism that I've employed in the past and things that are considered around how to create distance and create a different idea of the self as you kind of consider your ability to kind of go through certain metamorphosis. And I think my work in a lot of ways kind of is located very much in my maleness located very much in my Americanness and many people believe in and I find it to be true that it's located quite often in my blackness but partially a lot of those things are you know just portions of my identity and so as these kinds of portions of my identity become disseminated and become you know legible I think I always wonder how they can be deconstructed and how they function when I imagine them in pieces as opposed to being you know fully joined together. You know the challenge of getting used to a space when you become really accustomed to how you function in a space and I'm a studio rat in a lot of ways where I go to my studio every day and I know how to work there and I know where things are I know where to get other materials I know how to kind of navigate the space. And so kind of learning a new studio while also creating a new body of work was was quite complicated but in another sense it was really easy or made easy by the circumstances – I think the gallery was really present in helping me adapt and you know the people who I have with me were really helpful in helping me adapt so it became really you know, kind of the condition was quite familiar in that way. And you know it's kind of like pulling off a band-aid like learning how to work again a fresh face in a different way and for me those really and continue to be really interesting. you
