Simone Leigh, "The Gods Must Be Crazy," installation view, 2009. Courtesy Sculpture Center and the Artist.

Simone Leigh is a new world artist/ceramicist of the highest order. Her gnarly yet incredibly beautiful objects and installations provoke, inspire, and remain with you. She works her particular brand of heady and arty mash-up in a fabulous new installation at the Sculpture Center.  Our recent email interview about The Gods Must Be Crazy is below.

Simone Leigh, "The Gods Must Be Crazy," installation view, 2009. Courtesy Donald Suggs and the Artist.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Simone, your objects carry such an incredible energy as you play with diverse art historical tropes and poke fun at ethnographic blindspots. One of my favorite elements of the installation is the mix of textures, shapes, and sheens—boot prints, shiny points, colorful plastic buckets (so familiar in black and brown spaces), high yellow automotive paint on the pot diptych which sits on lowly cement blocks. How did you approach corralling all this into one installation?

Simone Leigh: I built the entire installation around the archeological term, skeuomorph. A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains material metaphors and ornaments of original object. Skeuomorphs serve to make the viewer/user more comfortable with the surrogate object by reminding the viewer of the original. My recent work combines my preoccupation with almost obsolete forms, like the terracotta water pot, with more contemporary surrogates like the plastic bucket or the woven bag made in China and used internationally as luggage. In The Gods Must Be Crazy, I incorporate biomorphic objects that I make by hand  and recent artifacts, as well as their surrogates. The piece investigates how nostalgia can alter perception and how antecedent meaning is delivered through surrogate forms.

"Planet of the Apes" poster, 1968.

KI:  Tell me about the cage. By the way, it appears to have no point of entry, or escape.

SL: I was thinking about the central cage in Planet of the Apes but when I started making drawings I realized it was more like the structure of a Central African teleuk. Probably because I had just become aware of Steven Nelson’s book, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa, that details how these domed structures became a part of the colonial project and therefore became another kind of ethnographic object signaling authenticity. There is a chapter called “The Pineapple in Paris” that discusses the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931. I’m very obsessed with this exhibition and artifacts from it often inform my work.

KI: I love the installation’s title The Gods Must Be Crazy. What drew you to that as well as the snippet of Planet of the Apes that you use as an entry point into the installation? What does working in video, often with appropriated footage, allow you do that appeals differently than the objects that you make?

"Planet of the Apes" film still, 1968

SL: I think that both films are science fiction and are out of time. And I enjoy the way science fiction always makes thinking about the location of culture and the formation of identity more obvious. In this installation, the video portrait is of Zira, the heroine of Planet of the Apes who is an ape surrogate for a woman. Her racial identity is unclear. In the film, she talks like a woman and acts like a woman. However, in this brief artifact of the film, she smiles like an ape. She’s giving ape realness. At several moments in the film the action is stopped and the “true nature” of the apes is reminded through some gesture.  Verisimilitude, essentialism and female subjectivity are at issue in the video as well as the sculpture.

"Wedgewood Bucket," mixed media, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

KI:  On the other hand, why make things, i.e. use your hands and your body to produce objects?

SL: I often think of the sculpture as performative. Performing “women’s work” is one sense. But also I think a lot about the narrative that allows an object to come to be considered ethnographic and not art is often it’s handmade quality. Loss of authorship is also important. I have spent a lot of time researching exactly how these objects are made and I try to make them in that way. So, in another sense, I’m also performing the work of the “anonymous African potter” (oftentimes a woman). So the hand making of objects is necessary for me conceptually. Besides, I like the way it looks.

KI:  What else is coming up on your busy summer agenda?

SL: I am installing this week at the Bronx Museum for AIM 29. Micaela Giovannotti is the curator. I’m making new work for a group show at Lisa Cooley in July called The Pleasure of Hating. David Hunt is the curator.

Simone Leigh, "The Gods Must Be Crazy," installation view, 2009. Courtesy Donald Suggs & the Artist.

KI: Thank you, Simone!

The Gods Must Be Crazy, part of the “In Practice” series, is on view at Sculpture Center until August 3, 2009.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, "As-yet-untitled work," 2009. Photograph, Ugandan bark-cloth bags, screw. Courtesy the Artist.

I met the artist Paul Mpagi Sepya when he worked at Creative Capital a couple of years back. I’ve followed his thoughtful, evocative, and beautiful photo portrait work ever since.

Last week, I got to check out his latest series, which is part of Homebase IV, an installation of work by an international array of artists in a former nursing and rehabilitation center on the Lower East Side in New York City.

Though his father is Ugandan, Paul grew up in San Bernadino, CA and has never visited Uganda. For this series, he photographed friends who have been to Kampala and objects they brought back from those visits. Following is the entirety of an email interview I conducted with Paul about his Homebase project.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, "Homebase" project, installation view, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

Kemi Ilesanmi: How did this year’s current “Homebase” location in a former medical facility help inspire this project? How did you work with this very particular historical, aesthetic, and psychic context?

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: The location was a definite catalyst in me thinking about home in this way. With both parents being in medicine, I spent a lot of time hanging out after school or volunteering as a kid in hospitals. My mom was big on that. There was a lot of sensory memory there. The space itself had a lot of content that I was not sure how directly to address at first. I began thinking of my idea of ‘home’ related to migration and stories because I imagine the medical profession is what set off my father’s journey that led to his children’s (and my own) peculiar relationship to Uganda.

Aesthetically, the building presented its own challenge. It is totally gutted! Hospitals are uncomfortable enough for a lot of people, and to walk into a medical center in New York City in that state made it even more so. But I thought it was very interesting that those conditions are often romanticized by western travelers who go to developing countries. It suggested a connection, I thought, between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ So I left my space as it was.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, "Jonathon, Brooklyn, NY," 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

KI: Since you usually work with subjects whom you already know and share a narrative with, I couldn’t help but wonder at the stories that passed between you and the sitters. Yet, I felt locked outside a certain knowledge even as I was intrigued by the rich exchanges that I imagined. Is that kind of tension between knowing and looking an important part of the portrait for you?

PMS: Yes! I’m really into establishing the foundational knowledge of a connection/narrative, but positioning it so that the content of that narrative is a private exchange. In a sense it’s my hope that those details are not important to the viewer’s experience, because I’m not spelling out the story but making projects that suggest how a narrative itself can work. Within that there is a lot of space for the viewer to fill in his own content—to imagine! To think about their own experiences that may relate.

That made this project somewhat difficult for me. Although all my projects are informed by my life, I have never made an autobiographical work that reveals the underlying stories… The difference between a memory, a portrait, a resolution, and even the Proofs projects only suggest at the stories behind them. Now I’m actually putting up family snapshots!

KI: I love the juxtaposition of the formal portraits of friends with the casual family snapshots. For me, it also highlighted the starkly different journeys on display: on the one hand, Americans headed to Uganda, perhaps for adventure or Peace Corps stints, and on the other, your father making his way across continents for a better life, the American Dream, or thereabouts.

PMS: The snapshots are of me as a baby. The portraits of me with my father in the red living room are at my mom’s parent’s house in Louisiana. It is a contrast in journeys, and the idea of ‘formative experiences.’ I like the tension given to the idea of how one’s experience is valued. What kind of journey, and how long must you go to claim an authentic experience?

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, "Hers," 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

KI: You also included images of objects that the sitters brought back from Uganda, right? And in one case, you display actual bark-cloth bags from there. What do those objects tell you?

PMS: I did include several photographs of objects that they brought back, now part of their home lives. My favorites are the handmade clothes hangers. The bark-cloth bags are little bags for school children brought for my brother and me by our grandmother. They were the one thing that we managed to hold on to after many other objects were lost.

KI: Did you grow up with Ugandan objects around the house? Food? Stories from Dad or relatives? The role of storytelling and objects as a construction of place, history, and connection is always fascinating.

PMS: There were so many things! We were taught Luganda, and had family visiting. We were especially close to our cousin Jane who lived with us for a while. I remember she would tell us stories, make sure we kept up our language lessons and would come see my brother and me in our little tae kwon do tournaments. But then she was sent away, along with all of our other tangible connections. I don’t know how I would find her now.

KI: When, if ever, does Uganda feel like home to you?

PMS: It’s like a messy inheritance. Something beautiful, but I don’t know how to handle it. I acknowledge it and cherish knowing that it’s there but at the same time it’s embarrassing to know how little I really hold of it. Sometimes it feels like maybe I made it all up.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, "Letters," mixed media, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

KI: How did you come across the student surveys that are also on display? Was it just by chance that everyone wants to be a doctor or a nurse? When I was growing up in Nigeria, the only acceptable career paths were doctor or pharmacist (if you were good at the sciences) or laywer (if you weren’t)…I was on the lawyer path, alas!

PMS: Patrick briefly taught an English language class and the papers are some of the homework assignments I culled. I specifically chose those four who wanted to be doctors and nurses. As I imagine, any of those children could be set off along the same future journey as my father and countless other immigrants. The title of that piece is Four Letters (Who will bring our children home?). Doctor was the only acceptable career choice for all of my siblings and me. Again, this messy inheritance handed to you, and how do you accept or reject it?

KI: Have you ever tried to visit Uganda?  Any desire or plans to do so?

PMS: I have never tried to visit Uganda, but I will one day. I have to.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, "Zoe," 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

KI: Is this an ongoing series?

PMS: I don’t know yet. The portraits as a concept have been on my mind for a while, but this installation is very specific to the Homebase project and it’s unique content and challenges. I could see it growing in the same way as the somewhat-related Family Portraits series has been. We’ll see!

KI: Thank you, Paul!

HomeBase IV is open noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday, through May 24, at 232 East Broadway, at Clinton Street, Lower East Side; (646) 957-7165, www.homebaseproject.com.

Kevin Jerome Everson, "Something Else," film still, 2007. Courtesy the Artist.

While I love living in New York City, there are nights when I long for the simplicity of only one truly art-worthy thing to do in town. Tonight is one of those nights. Two of my favorite venues have competing events and I’m wishing for a clone so I can do both.

Kevin Jerome Everson, "Second and Lee," film still, 2008. Courtesy the Artist.

Light Industry of Sunset Park, Brooklyn (a nearby candy factory always has me sniffing the air in joy) is showing several of Kevin Jerome Everson’s short films and the filmmaker is in attendance. Based in Charlottesville, VA, Everson often explores African-American working class life and joy in his experimental works. He mixes documentary style and scripted elements to high poetic effect. Even though he’s a Creative Capital grantee, I’ve only ever seen Cinnamon, a 2006 feature length film that peeked into the world of African-American drag racing down south through the experiences of a black woman who serves as a bank teller by day. I want more!

Fence Winter 2008-09 issue

Or, I could go to the Kitchen to checkout the Fence Books reading. Since 1998, both in a biannual journal and through a book publishing arm, Fence has published some of the best experimental poetry, fiction, art, and criticism out there. Without them and other similar presses (oh, so few!), many writers who create on the edges of convention wouldn’t have a space.  Tonight will feature readings from their two newest poetry collections: Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize and Laura Sims’s collection Stranger. Oh, did I mention they’ll have a circus?  Yep, Circus Razz will perform between readings!

L: Elizabeth Marie Young, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, Fence Books, 2009. R: Laura Sims, Stranger, Fence Books, 2009.

I told a friend of this dilemma and she called it my Sophie’s Choice, while I immediately thought of Solomon’s crafty decision to split the baby into two… Yes, I’m taking votes.

One of my favorite films of the year is ending its New York run at the Quad Cinema tonight! Treeless Mountain is a beautiful, quiet, and moving film by So Yong Kim that tells the tale of two young girls who are abandoned by their mother and then shuffled among relatives and landscapes. Set in South Korea, Kim’s birthplace, and starring several marvelous untrained actors, the film strikes a common chord of loss, resilience, and abiding hope. It’s a small film in the best sense.

It’s also worth keeping an eye out for Bradley Rust Gray’s (Kim’s husband) film The Exploding Girl, which recently won an acting award at the Tribeca Film Festival. It stars Zoe Kazan (remember her in Revolutionary Road with that lovely old-fashioned face?) in a love letter to confused youth, elusive love, and the city of New York.

Filip Gilissen, "Vamos," installation still, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Exhibition.

Is free sometimes the best value for art?  Well, it certainly can be when artists and curators turn an inquisitive and critically-engaged eye towards the nature of exchange, regeneration, and artistic creation. Two recent projects in New York City demonstrate the value of free art, free imagination, free form, and free rewards.

I happened upon the fabulous Exhibition in Nolita when I met one of the 5 organizers of this temporary art space for lunch just last week.  This six-month long continuous art experiment is being programmed by Elena Bajo, Eric Anglès, Jakob Schillinger, Nathalie Anglès, and Warren Neidich.

Ana Prvački and Boško Bošković, chocolate rabbits, 2009. Courtesy Exhibition.

One accounting of the simple premise is:

1. The site is a storefront lent by a luxury condominium development at 211 Elizabeth Street.
2. The site is open from March to August 2009, Wednesday to Sunday, 12 to 6.
3. The site hosts a single unfolding exhibition.

1. The work is not for sale and belongs to no one.
2. The work is an intervention upon interventions.
3. The work can be modified, parasitized and destroyed.

1. The artist is drawn from a hat.
2. The artist works in areas determined by a roll of dice.
3. The artist discusses these conditions in conversation and on-site.

Fantastic!  At least every three days, there is a new artist intervention, and while they can make whatever manner of changes inside the space, artists may not remove their own art works afterwards. When it comes in, it stays.

Art21's own Trong Gia Nguyen! Intervention with divinity, toilets, graffiti, and beer, 2009. Courtesy Exhibition.

Last week, I took in an exuberant gridded landscape of colorful confetti on the floor by Liz Linden along with Filip Gilissen’s mostly deflated “Vamos” ballons, as well as sometimes cryptic pencil drawings and tracings on the walls…and that’s just what I noticed in a quick visual sweep.

In 2 months, Exhibition (which can also be followed by blog) has already invited over 26 artists to intervene and freely create in the space and they hope to work with up to a total of 100 by the end of August. In the meantime, I look forward to visiting the space as often as I can.

Double A Projects, Free Store, 2009. Courtesy Double A Projects.

Perhaps, a more direct form of free exchange was the late winter art and commerce treat in lower Manhattan called the Free Store, which was organized by the artists Athena Robles and Anna Stein (aka Double A Projects). From February 18-March 22, 2009 they ran a store that “sold” items for free and also accepted free donations of everything from pencils, pez dispensers, shoes, DVDS, and tchotchkes to t-shirts, canned food, garden seeds, vintage bags, and art work such as photographs and hand-painted posters.

Framed by this moment of global economic crisis and inspired by alternative gift and barter economies long familiar to artists, Athena & Anna wanted to see what it would be like to “broaden this circle of trust and exchange by including the general public.”  How would people act when everything is free and yet predicated on collective giving as well as receiving?

Andres Serrano t-shirts, Free Store, 2009. Courtesy Double A Projects.

The act of exchange was not limited to objects, but also extended to ideas, information, and even food. The Free Store featured several wonderful curatorial interventions including a call and response lecture, a night of interactive performance art, and one afternoon of 15-minute professional feedback sessions provided by Edwin Ramoran of Aljira Center for Contemporary Art.

Free Store dinner party, 2009. Courtesy Julie Sengle and Double A Projects.

Probably my favorite Free Store event was the dinner party for 18, organized by freelance curator Julie Sengle. It featured donated food, recipes, and labor. Seats were given away by a mix of raffle and invitation to Free Store supporters and participants. A delicious and free communal dinner surrounded by art and ideas—does it get any better than that?

Anna, Athena, and the gang of five at Exhibition hope their experiments in free exchange and free creation will inspire other free experiments around the globe. So do I.