Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to Work in Progress, where I talked to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going today. On Work in Progress, I am really to share a conversation with one of the most compelling creators that I've encountered yet. He's inquisitive, wildly intelligent, and dedicated to taking a deeper look at the world. Mr Tony delas Reus. Tony is an inspiring visual artist who has been creating artwork it explores the complexity of the US Mexico border for several years now. He began by drawing big picture inspiration from Google Earth Imagery, and his work has since evolved into a closer inspection of the border, the walls that have come to define it, and the physical space and communities surrounding it. Tony's work has been featured in many renowned galleries and museums such as Lachma, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Annaberg Space for Photography, where we first met, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. I fell in love with his Paranoid Architecture series at the Annenberg space, and I knew then and there, but I had to have him on the podcast. In my conversation with Tony, we died deep into thoughts on artistic beginnings, how we react to tragedy, power of art, and the importance of examining the lines that divide us. This was such an incredible discussion, Enjoy. I'm so excited to have you on the show today and thank you for taking the time. I I first became aware of your work, as you know, UM at the Annenberg Space for Photography. It's one of my favorite places to visit to see art egs aitions in Los Angeles, and I think I have I also have a little bit of just sort of what's the what's the word? I'm looking for collegiate appreciation for anything Anenburgh, because I went to the Annaburg School of Journalism at USC and your work was a part of four pieces of your work were part of this incredible exhibition called Walls Defend, Divide and the Divine and and the idea behind the exhibition was to explore barriers that were both real and perceived and to look at what these walls have meant to human history through centuries. Um So you know, the examination of sort of castles and forts and up to the Berlin Wall in the US Mexico border. And and it's such an incredible exhibition and the photography that is up there is breathtaking, all of it really, And yet I was coming around a corner and I saw these pieces. There were eight of them, actually in two squares of four, and I just I was speaking to the woman who curates the space, and I was looking kind of over her shoulder, and I finally said, I'm so sorry, I have to go see what those are because she was explaining something to me and I was so distracted. Uh, they look like almost like Joseph Albert's pieces, and he's one of my favorite mid century artists, and and I think that's why they caught my eye. And and yet the colors, rather than being in in you know, blocked color temperature, uh, gradients, were so vibrant and and they reminded me of something. And then I realized they reminded me of colors from the desert, colors from you know, pottery that you find along the border. Um, they had that kind of cultural vibrancy. And and in the center of each square, I realized I was looking at some sort of a structure, and and then I learned, um, from the curator, that you had gone and photographed all of the test pieces of this new border wall, which I would just like to clarify as ironic to me and and such a colossal waste of taxpayer money since we already have a border wall, and in some parts of some regions along the borders there's actually already two walls. UM, just just feel like that's important to share. But it was so kind of arresting to me and and beautiful. And I turned to the curator and I said, this is exact claim my kind of activists art. And she said, well, then you have to meet Tony uh. And that's that's how this all began. Oh thank you. Yeah. No, UM, I found it interesting that you know my my work that that that series is called Paranoid Architecture, and it is eight representations of the Trump border wall prototypes and um, because I did do some alteration with photoshop and digital manipulation. But even though they were actual documents of the wall, as the border walls has taken from the Mexican side of the border, UM, they had a hard time including that in the show, because technically it wasn't photography with I had altered it in order to up color contrast, and as you said, referenced modernist formalism like Alberts and I think what was interesting to me is that in the show there are a lot of these magnificent photographs, as you said, of of these epic images of the walls in Israel and around the world, and and very much kind of a national geographic. I feel my work is more about kind of the psychic dimensions that the border has on me personally. We were so used to looking at border walls from the point of view of you know, journalism and the politics that's happening at the border, or my migrant issues, refugee issues that for me, as as important as those are, I feel that I absolutely have to tell my relationship to it in order to make my work uh true. You know, if I can't say how I am and how I experienced the border as a person and someone of partial Mexican descent lives in Los Angeles who's not an immediate migrant right, who's not necessarily evolved and political activism explicitly with the border, Um, how do I reconcile what that space is to someone like myself. And you mentioned living here. You you were born in California. Did you grow up in Los Angeles. Yeah, I'm born and raised in Los Angeles, and I've always I've always appreciated the fact that you know, I live about from the border and that, as I said, I'm partial Mexican ancestry, but that part of me and very much part of being from Los Angeles and being surrounded by the culture of Mexico just by default, you know, l A is a Mexican city to a great extent, and um, when I decided to start a broad new series, it seemed like a natural fit to go back to. It's an autobio, autobiography that wasn't a kind of documentation, but was along the field of what it means to be someone who lives in Los Angeles, group in Los Angeles and focused on this aspect of my relationship with the border. I'm curious about that about your your childhood, because I love to focus on what people are doing with them, but I also really love to know how it all began. And I think we have such interesting perspective into why we do what we do. Now when we look back at how we grew up, So what what was growing up in Los Angeles? Like, what were you aware of culturally? Are were your parents very creative people? Um My, My my father is an attorney, but he is very, very much interested in music and he was very very good amateur pianist. Um but I grew up in the suburbs in Torrance, which is, uh, you know, in a little bit from Danna Beach, and it was incredibly boring. Everything. I just I remember that any aspect of difference I could find was I just held onto it. So the fact that, um my dad, especially, we would listen to classical music, we would listen to jazz. My grandfather was a jazz musician. And I'll talk Tom Cheryl. That will come up in our talk, but um uh that and reading history as a kid, and for my dad was into Napoleon and the battles of the early nineteenth century, and I got hooked on that as well. So you have to imagine this kid who was really creative and very interested in the world, but who looked around and saw nothing. You know, I was little league. I did. I did all this stuff you're supposed to do. But none of them after my imagination at all, and so reading, listening to music, making art, I was. I was always drawing whatever I could, whenever I could, and so I had to I had to find my imaginative sources from outside of my immediate world. I had. I had a hunt for that, and I think, like you know, any any inquisitive child does you know, we're just hungry for finding experiences that that means something to us and to a great time. I found them in books, music, and art and not in a cookie cutter suburban buildings. Sure, what what was the meaning you were finding? I mean, you reference your father's piano playing your grandfather's jazz music. What what imaginative doors was that type of creativity opening for you? I think more than anything, uh, because the president didn't seem very interesting. I needed something that had like like a like a tether that I could hold onto from the past, from some exterior source, something that felt more or less emotional. Right, music is immediate. Um. It was funny. In my home there was a kind of a taboo against pop music. It was unspoken, but my dad was was kind of a snob in that in that way. But but for for a good reason, you know. So I listened to pop music on the slide, but for the most part, I guess the gravity of of classical music and the intensity of jazz I did really connect to and and I was looking for a way it's to a great extent to find an imaginative universe and the combination of finding histories outside of myself and personal oddly, I mean, right, why why? How how is it that we can relate to anything that we don't actually experience, but we experienced some second hand, but they still have more meaning than things that that seemed to be immediately around us. I find that really fascinating and very much it's well within my artistic practice. Well, and what an interesting thing to point out that that we can truly be transported, you know, into these worlds through books, films, music. Um understand that we're learning lessons, that we're having cathartic experience with characters, that that we are feeling the humanity of the people who are in these pages. And yet we kind of are dulled or desensitized to the humanity around us quite often, to humanitarian issues, to crises, when you know, when when we speak about the issue at the border which I know we'll get into more later. I'm I'm always so struck when I hear people say, well, they shouldn't have come here. I'm like, let alone the fact that they you know, Mexico was a territory of the United States and the first California Constitution was bilingual. They couldn't have come here, is it's on any level, it's it's insane. Well, and it misses. And you mentioned this earlier, the the natural motion or the natural order, you know, I think I think about how to your point, you know, you weren't wildly inspired by sort of cookie cutter buildings in suburbia. As a person who loves design, I understand that a building that is designed in a way that creates spatial flow can boost creativity. And buildings that are badly designed make people feel kind of itchy when they're inside. You don't feel comfortable, you don't feel like you can breathe. And and I think about the sort of design of these larger systems and how they interfere with motion and with interpersonal relationships, and with even the micro tory patterns of birds and animals. You know, there there is a natural order to the way we move together that can often be interrupted. And and then you see the effects as you mentioned with this border town that you love, that was very multicultural and that had these two nations kind of in flow together, and and then this wall went right through it and the whole place was disrupted for for everyone, quote on both sides. And so and I think that'll that will be an interesting thing to unpack. I don't want to sidetrack us too much into the present because there are more questions I have about your past. Um. It's interesting, you know, talking about I think you know, this is bigger issue of of how we how we sort of disassociate ourselves from the immediate. I think part of that is is that the culture has has really gone so corporate as to really not want who um interact with you as a human being. The culture and culture as we experience it. It's really about a flow pattern of commerce, right. It's sort of positioning you in two various creeks and rivers and tributaries so that you will get from point eight to point B fairly seamlessly. And and the natural inclination of intuition and being inspired and just being able to stop and take a look at something and think about it. Like, our culture doesn't really want you to do that. Our culture just wants you to get to a place where you can either consume or produce and the result. We're really we're really sort of trained to be um like to project effects rather than to reflect upon being alive. Like literally being alive is not some thing that that most of us spent a lot of time appreciating because we're too busy doing other things. I mean I feel that way, you know. Also as a teacher and as a parent, I'm always it's really hard to just stop and just just you know, take a breath and just sort of say, hey, I'm here with these people, and I need to know that that there. I don't have an agenda. My agenda is to be here, you know. That's that's it, and to and to pick up traces of meaning and and experience from these people surrounding me. And it's hard because we're on such a clock. Yeah, Presence is tricky and requires such practice. Do you do you think that art helps you find that? Do you feel really present when you make art or when you when you look at art? Oh? Absolutely, I mean I don't know who I would be without making art um And it's every time I'm in the studio, every time I'm thinking about what I'm doing and making something, it's a reset. But it's like you're going back to the I don't know, but I know I need to know the moment of the complete hunger. And it isn't like being in the studio is not like it's not like an epiphany all the time. You know, it's not like you're you're seeing fireworks and you're excited about what you're going to do. But there is this kind of amazing, ah, really fulfilling vacuum where you're allowed time to stop and to have to be kind of unfiltered right to not to let let the ego kind of subside and to let all the other um penetrating thoughts inside and then allow that to manifest themselves through action. I mean, I I keep telling my students that, um, you're not there to make anything right, You're not there to make art. You don't you don't make art. You you let you let the current flow through you, and it it at some point, it starts to make itself. If you're intuitive enough to pay attention, if you can see that you're controlling something makes dead things, and once you see that not controlling things make living things. And the art that you make is honest, it's uh and and meaningful. And that's how I feel in the studio. I'm always constantly trying to push out anything that says, here's what you need to do and to allow for here's what you might consider. M hmm, that's really beautiful. I'm struck thinking about you're finding a pathway to art as a child, and now in the present you teaching art. You know, it's it's such a it's such a cool thing. Who who was your first art teacher or or were you in your childhood more experiencing art from the position of observing it, you know, were you going to museums? What? What's your kind of earliest memory of understanding that art could be something that you could interact with or make. Well, it's funny. I mean, the most profound moment I have is when I was about eleven and my parents took me to France and we went to the Louver. You know, I had been a big movie buff. I've been a big fan even as a kid. I remember going to sit around the dome and seeing amazing art experiences, and I remember seeing like Kubrick films on big screen. I mean, I remember seeing movies as art. But when we went to the Louver, I saw that painting was especially on that level, especially like academic painting. In them, it was was like watching a frozen movie. It was like watching like you know, how one you're in. You're watching a really great movie and you just wish you would stop, just so that you could just you know, you you don't want it to rush, but you don't have any choice because it's time based. And music is similar like that. But painting is such a weird theater. It's such a theater of silence and openness, and I remember thinking this is what I want to do. So even though I kept working, you know, I was making films in high school and I was I actually started at U c l A. Wanting to be a filmmaker. I kept going back to that moment when a single image, a flat image on canvas, could do essentially the same thing that I got out of film. And later on in college I realized that's when I need to make a shift. So I think it's funny that you know, some of my favorite movies are like Lawrence of Arabia and other epic films, and here I am in this other desert making work about this epic political issue, historical issue and the history. Painting that I saw in the Louver, especially artists like Delaquan and Jericho, they they made me just it just opened my eyes to the possibility of doing something epic that's also silent, that's also frozen, and you let the viewer, you know, move through this thing and and let them be uh, let to be occupied forever, endlessly. And that's what I also love about paintings is that you can you can continue to go back to them, and the good ones are always new. It's the oddest phenomenon that I know of, and it's true of film, but you sort of expect that because of the time. But the idea of a fixed object renewing your your your your sense of being on a continual basis, it's such a it's just just kind of wild idea. And so yes, going to museums. M Luckily, my parents were very very much appreciative of my art um so that was huge to me in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles luckily had a great had several great collections, great museums, the Norton, Simon, Lacma, then later on Mocha, now the broad I mean that's something that, like I'm we're always getting our kids to be exposed to, because even though they hate being ACTI museum openings and gallery openings and all of that, I know that at some point it's radically opening up their world two things other than you know, Netflix or whatever. I love that, and it's true. I I do find that in the midst of this, you know, shelter at home, quarantine, we're all experiencing together. One of the things I miss most is museums. I'm just I'm my heart aches when I think about them, and I'm excited for the day when we get to go back into into that space. When when you think about the the impact of those places you know, on you as a child. And you mentioned earlier that you were always drawing. Did you begin making art by drawing? Was that your first kind of endeavor and what were you what were you drawing? Yeah? Uh, you know, it's funny I mentioned National geographics. There was something really transporting about copying different things from national geographic magazines. Um, you know, people's that seemed incredibly exotic to me in my suburban my suburban mini temple, and I you know, the landscapes. All of that seemed as if somehow I was trying to apprehend the world in a in a real modest and maybe dumb way, but uh, it felt like it was an opening up. You know, it was an opening up to question where I was and how big the world was and how much I needed to be out in it. So, you know, it could be skylines of cities that I've never visited, or you know, native peoples in the Amazon, or deserts in the south West. I would just copy these things, and I think they were It was just a way of digesting them as best I could without being and and we're there artists, you know, you speak about these classical historical painters. You became aware of it at the Louver when you went to France. Were there artists that you were trying to emulate as a kid. Yeah, Well that's interesting because, um, the other thing I did a lot of was like copied movie posters from the thirties, forties and fifties, which is I think back on that and think that what a weird kid, I must have been. I'm going into these into the library and I'm checking out books on graphic art and design and movie posters, and I would take them home and I would make my own mini movie posters. And also like like you know, war posters and and things that had these kind of you know, epic reaches out an advertise razing for big stories, right, um posters from World War One, you know about buying bonds, and you know, posters of Humphrey Bogart African queen. Like I I forget, like how much time I spent with an open book with graphic art and trying to copy this stuff. And you know, I can't imagine being uh, well actually I can't because my my daughter and then my son are really drawing quite a bit. But how addam must have been from my parents to look over my shoulder and see this open book of you know, movie posters from movies before I was born and me drawing them. I mean, they must have thought would a strange child. But the fact that nobody interferes with you, the fact that you have parents that are generous enough to say to not say, well, you should be playing outside. You know, I never heard that I was like, they just sort of let me be. And I you know, as a parent, I have to fight that preoccupation to interject my my own ideas into my kids. I don't I don't need my kids to be artists. I don't need to be involved in our world. But I do want them to appreciate experiences and then they could do what they want with them. Sure, I I imagine that's such a struggle. I think about it. You know. I said to my mom, I said, God, I just wish you'd made me take piano lessons because I love music. And she was like, but you didn't want to, you know. And so there's this there's this really interesting thing where I think about some of the hobbies that I had as a kid, and and how lucky I was that my parents let me pursue them. And then I also wish that, you know, they had they had kind of forced me to do some things I could have held onto um in my adult life. And I don't know how as a parent you're meant to solve for that. It must be quite a conundrum to know, to your point, where to interject and where not to. So you know, you never had any like musical leanings or I've always really I've always really loved music. UM. But I think the thing that probably threw me from becoming more musical. Um the school that I was in as a really young kid didn't have a music program. And then when I got into a school that did, Uh, my option was to join the orchestra, and I was assigned to play the flute, and like, I just don't care about the flute. I think it's beautiful, don't get me wrong, But for me, it wasn't a thing I wanted to stick with. And I think in my little, you know, childhood brain that wasn't developed to make the connections I can make now, I went, I don't want to do this. It wasn't maybe I should try another instrument, you know. And it's so easy to make horrible sound. It is. When you start playing the flute. A minute then you try, you're like, oh my god, I can't do like this is it's terrible. You feel like you're hurting the world. And for me it was just gross. I was like, there's a spit trap. This is disgusting. I don't want to I don't want to do this. Um. But now as an adult I'm I'm beginning to figure out how to learn to play the piano. And it's the thing that I realized, you know, if I, if I love it, I should lean into it. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean I did play quite a lot of piano growing up. It's interesting, you know, I was pretty much forced to play piano, and I played it to being a teenager, and then I stopped because it didn't feel right. But I picked it up later in my late twenties early thirties, and I got pretty good for a while. And it is there's something it was really I was really appreciate the fact that I had enough of a base line of knowledge so that later on when I wanted to play some things that are more sophisticated, I know, I wasn't afraid. So I think as long as you're a kid and you have a kind of familiarity, it just breeds a kind of trust, and then you can turn that into a kind of confidence. You know. Uh, but if you if you, if you've had these bad experiences are not non experiences with with some of these things, I think that you know, you don't you don't follow through later like it's great that you're open enough to do this because I'm sure you've been inspired by friends, people you know, musicians you know, and musicians you don't know, and and and you you have a connection that's not just as a consumer. You have a connection as appear on some level, however modest, and you want to participate in that. Right. So I wonder, then, how when we think about how we participate in what we pursue. When did the switch flip for you where you realized that art was something you could do as a career, that that it wasn't just a hobby. You didn't just want to draw and trace and and you know, recreate posters and paintings, that that you wanted to make art as your job. When did I know that, Oh, we're realized it was possible. Yeah, well it's it's still difficult, you know. I mean, an artist is never easy. Um, but I would have to say that, Um, you know, when I made the commitment to go to grad school in San Francisco and major in painting, then then you're kind of you're all in. Right. It's one thing to get a degree in college with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and you've been painting. It's another thing to go to grad school because you're you're quite responsible for not only history of your craft, but also theory of your craft, and and um, you you sort of position yourself when the within the legacy of it and the weight of it, and also the opportunities of the future that it might provide. And um, you know, grad school in painting is hilarious place to be. Why that's not what I expected you to say. As far as the feedback about getting a master's of fine art? What's hilarious in this sense that you know, you're really and I don't think people well I think people you know, find it ludicrous on some levels, but you kind of are a quantum physicists athetics. You know, you're you're pushing the boundaries of what is. I mean, just the other night, uh, somebody asked me, well, can you tell me what art is? And I was like, and this was at the end of a of a of a dinner conversation, and and I said, seriously, you're gonna ask me that now, like we're at the end of dinner, Like this is not there's no takeaway from that from that question. And I just sort of say, yes, uh, oh, here's what art is check please. You know it doesn't work like that. So you know it's it's and and in art school it's it's it's you know, years of reading and theory and and critiques and and you know, criticism that hurts and criticism that you really respect, and you sort of bashed around as a person um while you're still trying to make alliances and you're you're trying to Yeah, you the middle of grad school, you do figure, you do question yourself like, wow, is this really what I want to do. But at the end of the day, when you're alone in your student you or with your with friends and you're talking about work, and it just it washes over you that of course this is what I should be doing. There is nothing else, Like everything else is, it seems thin, Which is funny because to everyone else art seems really thin. Everyone else, art seems like the last thing you do at the end of the day. You do it when it's it's it's when you when you when you have time, you write a poem, when you have time, you play some music when you have you know, it's like it's never the first thing you should do. And once you realize that without it, there is nothing else, right, then that's when you realize you're in the right place. And grad school to a great extent, is about um separating, uh, separating what you should be doing for what you think you should be doing. Like it's really about centering yourself. That really strikes me as interesting, separating what you're doing from what you think you should be doing. So, what were some of the lessons that you learned there? What are some of those lightbulbs about where you invest your time? Yeah, um, well, it's interesting. I did know. I did know early on that I was very interested in different types of materials and different types of of thanks to work with so even as even as even as painting matters to me very very much, Um, I was playing around with different types of materials, but also the image. Really, once I realized how important images are and how much they stick with you, I, image and memory are very, very, very connected. Right when you think of you're childhood, there's probably a few images you know immediately spring to mind, like very specific images, and we craft our identities and narratives around those images. And it's so funny about all the things we forget or all the things we uh we choose to forget um so that what memory does, an image memory is really create this alternative being from the being that's living. Right. What what's interesting about art is that you're you're you're making images and creating or working with images. That our combination of how you literally picture the world by choice and then how you exist in the world by chance. That was that was a very important thing I got out of grad school that I was dealing with certain types of personal histories, images from those two trees, but also images from things that had meaning, and then how they felt within the presence of the studio. Well you because I realized we're speaking about it and and I'm sure there's some people listening who I love the idea of theory purpose, you know, what activates us, how deep art is. But we touched on you getting your m f A, your master's a fine art in grad school. What does that really mean? What is what is the process of a master's? Because I would wager that there are some students wondering if it's for them, And perhaps you can shed a little bit of light on what goes into the pursuit of an education around that depth of art and what art has actually meant to society and and the way that I would I would pose it. Society could not have developed without art. So what is it to study that in that way? Well, that's a those are that's a great question. It's very big. Let's try try and do my bad just you know, there's a casual thing for you on a Tuesday. I know. Um well, I would say first of all that if you if you don't live and die art, and I don't mean by like the big picture like you making it, don't don't go to school like it's just you have to you have to think if you have to understand yourself as someone who who it's like oxygen or blood. Like it's just it's just there, um for for anyone approaching the idea, you know, masters of fine art. It's it depends on which school you go to, right Some schools are very theory late and summer very craft laden, so you really have to do your homework about where you want to be. I chose San Francisco because it had a had a legacy of of sort of a particular West Coast avant garde, and especially what is the what does the West Coast avant garden mean? To to a lay person. Yeah sure, um, well, you know, I'll use my grandfather's example before you get are. But basically, like historically there's been a West Coast East Coast jazz. I mean, it's also true of wrap, like you take a common medium, but there's a flavor on the East coast, it's a flavor on the West coast and jazz. Uh. Everyone was on the beach, you know, pump, you know, everyone's like everyone's intense, really on it. But in the West Coast it was laid back and everyone who was sort of post beat, so dump nump up nut dump. It was kind of like slightly mind and that sort of flattened out the sound in a way which kind of got more of a groove that wasn't caffeinated. You know. Uh, like I listened to you know, you know, be about from the fifties, it's like, holy sh it, like these guys are like incredibly tight and on task. Meaning in the in the West Coast, um, uh kind of was non or less intellectual intellectual in a way. It was. It was kind of in the same vein. It was much more uh, much more physical and not embarrassed that the physicality of it wasn't tied to an intellectual aspect, like there was a sort of relationship between the body, not as an abstract the maker of work, but the body is kind of a person, like an individual character who uh, in a various kind of simple way, painted what they felt, painted what they saw. And there was also a huge history, especially in the Bay Area, of relationship to Eastern art, which completely changed the trajectory of art history that references to Buddhism and Japanese printmaking heavily influenced artists on the West Coast in Los Angeles and California. I'm sorry in San Francisco that that allowed the work to be I think a little more kind. What do you mean by that? Um Well, A lot of art, especially abstract art from the post war period, tended to be very intense and sort of grabs you by the the the color and says you need to see me, you need to see this, right, you need to see you need to deal with me. West Coast art I didn't didn't have that same effect. It said, you know, you can take me, you can leave me, uh to a great extent, as long as you experienced me and take me at face value. I'm happy, and there's also more humor in West Coast start. One of the greatest artists is edwar who a lot of your listeners are familiar with Jaldon Baldassari. Amazing, amazing artists and teacher c l A just passed. These are artists that always had a twinkle in their eye, you know, always was like, you know what this is a I'm gonna give you a big insight, but it's kind of like a con It's like a it's like a little bit of a riddle and I'm gonna do it in a way which you're gonna walk away saying huh rather than wow. So um. When I chose San Francisco, uh, And also the East Coast is always seemed ver foreign to me because the point reason lay that I just felt it felt like a better fit for me. Um. Ironically, when I went to San Francisco, a lot of the some of the teachers thought my work was too cool and to l a because there were a lot more gestural and sort of a motive and I was kind of playing with a sort of a cooler vibe and they said like, oh, yeah, your your work looks like it's from l A L. I has this at this attitude and uh in the art world of being kind of a very different special place where just come on, come on here and make the work you want to make, and we won't ask anything of you. Doesn't need to look a certain way, it just needs to and you ceased to be authentic, and then we'll fit it in with everything else is happening in the city. And that's why I've never felt compelled to leave. I've always felt that it's always a new city. It doesn't ask me to be anyone in particular. It doesn't have that that headbutting that you find in New York. It's a place where, like I was saying earlier, you really can just sort of stop and just look around you. I noticed that behind you you have a photograph from Joshua Tree. And that's exactly what I'm talking about. Can you imagine that photograph in New York, right in a New New York person's house. It doesn't I don't even heard of them. It was Joshua Trees are the oldest trees I think living things are. They're close to the oldest living things on the planet Earth, and they're they're they're very alien, they're strange, they're interesting by silhouette right there, not the forests of the East coast. Uh, it's it's a it's a flat horizon of desert and these amazingly weird things pop up in the middle of it. I think that's a really good example of the people in l A too. Right, we're sort of all stuck on this plane. We're all very interesting in the way we are, and and with with a lot of space. I mean, we have a lot of space here. So all that stuff affected my work and still does. As you were developing your style and you know, getting your masters and really diving so deep into as you mentioned, the history and the craft of art, did you find a mentor or mentors? Mm hmm. I asked because people have asked me that, you know, who was your mentor? And I never had one, and I wish that I had, And so I'm curious now about if artists who I admire have or had mentors. Yeah, it's funny. I never had the kind of hand on your shoulder mentor, but I had some people that influenced me quite a bit, and one of them was in Underground. Uh. It's an artist named Marvin harden Um uh, really terrific l a artist. And it was amazing about him was that every day he would show up to class in the exact same outfit, which was blue jeans and a jeans jacket. And he's very handsome man, uh uh. And he wore he wore these heavily tinted purple glasses. And he was a painting teacher, and he would look at a painting of mine and talk about color, and I always thought, how the hell the like, how can you see that this shade of yellow is the wrong yellow or is too antagonistic or whatever? And with these glasses on, and he would make he would be was very good colorist, but he never I never saw him not wearing these glass us is what I learned from him. And his his language he made very very very subtle again sort of getting back to maybe a part of it, uh, sort of a zen mindset. Um. He didn't speak a lot. He was very quiet. I knew he was a he was fond of horseback riding. And anyway, he would make his little tiny drawings that were maybe six inches tall and one inch wide pencil at least little tiny hatch marks and often in the very bottom there would be a tiny little animal like a horse. There was just the weirdest little drawings, and and the thing I walked away from them. You know, here's this kid who was so impressed with these giant, epic French paintings in the louver. I didn't feel any different when I looked at those little drawings he made, and and his sort of approach of subtlety and generosity. He was harsh, um, but he's always honest, and at the time I didn't think of him as a mentor at all. There are there are other teachers that I enjoyed more and the same as true as grad school. Um, but I'll just never forget the kind of aura he had. It just sort of generated kindness, a methodical looking and a real appreciation to He was always talking about every single square inch of your work needs to matter. Do not do not think that the things on the edges are less consequential than the things in the center. Ever, and I learned that that is the most important thing in making art. There's no such thing as a periphery. It's a it's a total plane of experience. Because in getting back to this idea of the silent object operating on you so magnificently. If you look at at a fantastic painting like the Girl with the pearl earring right, which is in the Hague. UM, I was fortunate to see that in person there is no moment in that painting, including a vast dark area around around uh, the portrait of the woman, every part of it feels so intense and so many poul that. Uh. What I got from from Marvin was this, this this knowledge that, like it's super knowledge right there, that scale really doesn't matter. A scale doesn't matter, point of reference doesn't matter. Everything matters. When you care, everything matters. M I'm so struck by what that lesson meant to you for your work. The idea that there is no such thing as a periphery, this notion of one plane when you care, everything matters, All of that feels inherently equally relatable to how we look at society. There is no such thing as a periphery. The way we've been cultured to kind of look at what's in front of us and push what we don't like out to the sides. You know, we become desensitized to the crisis of refugees or to gun violence. But we really live on one plane of existence. Every single person is in a way the central figure in their own painting or their own photograph. And and if we could remember when we look at people that they are as important to someone as our spouse or child, or parent or sister is to us, you know what would that How would that change the way we relate to each other? And and this notion, you know that when you care, everything matters. I think that's the sort of root feeling of so many activists of why so many of us, in various ways do what we do. And it all leads me to wonder, how early in your career did you start to because you were making those types of observations, how early did you start making interpretations of historical and political works. Uh? Well, I think I think it was always there. I mean we talk about childhood, right and how you know, I mean even listening to classical music as a youth without the intention of being a classical musician learning about history. Uh it put me in a trajectory where I was always thinking about you know, not not my reference within my my own years, but my reference as as at the end tale of many many many years prior that I would that I was that was really part of a legacy of being that you know, had an infinite a starting point. And so I've always been interested in finding places that are not immediately next to me, but places that or a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. I've read so much amazing you know what, when I'm when I'm making work, I'm I'm always referencing all sorts of types of histories. Uh. I remember reading a book once about how people in the medieval Europe saw nature and how that started to change around the seventeenth century, that the nature itself was seen as a sacred space. We think of we think of Western history as being, you know, the culprit behind climate change, and it certainly recent history is right recent, meaning that last a couple of centuries. But before that, there was a time it was it was sick like that things like mining from for metal was thought of as being, uh a sort of rape of the earth. That there was an actual European mindset when mining and uh, you know, taking things out through greed was an actual horrific interference with with the natural forces that that we we should we should generously accept what it has, not take from it. And that I remember thinking, well, this is not my understanding of history. This is you know, so reading these alternate histories about you know, when you think about a certain thing, usually there's a history at some point that contradicts what you normally think about it, right, There's always if you dig deep enough, you'll realize that the stories that you take for granted are wrong. And I would say to a great extent that that my work about the border is part of that idea that you know, I had. I had thought about the border as a place of and in a very particular way, based on how I was taught, based on my knowledge of history and politics and even my own, you know, my own personal history. In order to get to know it, I had to just sort of fine new ways of shaking off the dust of all of that poor sentiments of knowledge. I think most of us are coded with poor information, right, And the best information you have to look for it yourself. It's there, the true stuff, the stuff that really is mature, right, it's not pre digestive, it from some other source like a you know, mama bird to a baby bird. The best stuff for all of us, you have to find and you yourself, you have to you have you have to make it. So the Border project, it's titled Border Theory, really is about that. It's about me digesting this this thing that's had consequences for my own uh life, but also, um, it's something that I find relevant to how we should all pick apart things that we otherwise hold as a bias very tight. I wish I could do with everything. Yeah, I mean, the the examination of self, of belief, of society. It feels so incredibly important and and I'm also, I guess because of the time that we live in so worried about how people go to search because there are these crazy disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories and you know, God, I just got a message the other day. I I had interviewed a scientist to talk about, you know, what what all of this COVID business means and how we're going to get to the other side of it, and what does it really look like to find a vaccine? And I got a message from someone saying, well, you know that all the vaccine companies are owned by Bill Gates and he's going to make billions and they probably let this virus out and I was like, where are you getting your information? What is happening? You know? And I worry for us that now when we try to go and learn more, there is the risk of being yanked into these I see it almost like there's these venus fly traps that have been set that are trying to yank people into h into these rabbit holes that will make us distrust each other more that that are that are filled with this dangerous sort of nationalistic, tribalistic mess and and tribalism really has only ever served two denigrate humanity and also to cause a lot of pain and a lot of death and a lot of loss. And and it's always in the places where we get in better flow with each other, where we create better systems, where we can live together, where we have more access, where where we look out for each other, those are always the places where humanity gets better. And so, my god, I hope that as we talk about ways to shake off the sediment, people listening and just people out there will also be really careful and cognizant of, you know, where they're seeking information and and do so with you know, respected and trusted sources, because it's Harry out there's a there's a problem, there's a trust issue. It's really has happened to a great extent, is that, um, everyone, everyone is desperate for trust. Everyone is desperate to say yes, yes, I you and I are together. Right, But but everyone, there's so many agents that are doing that for their absolute wrong reasons. They're just to create numbers, right, to create your great numerical data allies and or votes, and uh. Trust has to be trust has to be earned on so many levels. And yet the methods for acquiring trust to become so flimsy and easy. Now that I know people that I really respect, and then they'll say something like, oh, well you ever thought about this because blah blah blah. I just so you're talking thinking about and I'm like, WHOA, I didn't think you had that in you. I didn't think I didn't think you were like that, you know, conspiracies or whatever it is. And it's almost as if you if you don't have an answer for something, people won't trust you, Like if you don't have opinion about something, people won't trust you. And and you know, what about honoring people who who take the time to consolidate lots of different options and make up their mind and who are just you know, like I said, methodical Why why? And the reason is, of course, it's because of the way we frame time and what we're supposed to do, like you're supposed to make all your decisions quickly, and that the analog time is for for all intents and purpose has been completely leveled. Right, Analog time is kind of a part of human history, at least modern history that seems to have disappeared. Ironically, you have to go out of your way to get back into that kind of time, which and and to a great sense of luxury. Right, a lot of people escape to get that analog time back. That that those moments where you slow down enough so that you can trust on a humane level and not just a political or ego centric level. So when we think about the current landscape, you know, trust information, disinformation. What's what's happening to people? This this sort of false illusion of a periphery. I think about your work at the Border. But before before I launched us into this newer project, I feel like it would be remissed to not discuss your movie Dick series, um because again on on your interpretations of the historical political and literary movie Dick feels like a big one to touch on, and I I would just love for you to walk us through that a bit, where the idea came from. You know what what the project is about, how it's framed. Oh yeah, um uh, well, I had never read the book. I know that it's it's one of those things that you know, people really push, push away, or they read in high school for some horrible English teacher who thought it was a gift from God, but they didn't that you couldn't get into it. But I read it only, you know, fairly recently, and and I couldn't believe how pressing it was. I couldn't believe that it felt like contemporary America on multiple levels. Uh. The biggest part, because I could go on forever about about the novel was that it seemed to say that America, the America's founding myth, was antagonistic, that there was always another, it was there was another that we need, that that we can only identify ourselves around the notion in opposition to the other. So this idea of an expansive utopian uh content that was quote unquote discovered right. Well, of course it wasn't discovered, and of course that it wasn't there's for the taking, right, It was not. It was not, It was not for America. America was not preordained. But America likes to think of itself as being preordained because it it pushes itself into a future of necessity rather than a future of condition. So, like, you know, if you grew up in all and any other country in the world, it's a really it's a mess, right, it's a mess of histories. But America's central identity has always been the poor towards uh, you know, you know, the frontier spirit, right, like the myth, the central myth of America is the rugged individual uh finding their own place within a hostile environment. And Moby Dick is the story of a incredibly brilliant but very deranged captain who's willing to sail over the entire globe in order to hunt down this one whale that did off his leg. So the center of this story is this crazy story about madness and paranoia and all sorts of stuff, and and and when I read the book, it was during the it was in two thousand six, during the Iraq War. And literally am i as I'm reading this book, uh Felusia has taking place. Ballafelusia was one of the most you know, devastating operations for the Marines. And I'm thinking about Saddam Hussein as the whale and President Bush as um captain they have and this had already been spoken about that that you know, Osama bin Lauden is the whale, right like that We've always had these, not coronavirus, right. Like I feel like even Trump's relationship to the I think he calls it the great Unseen enemy, right or that or worse, the Chinese virus. Right. He has to posit it in a sense that it's it's not natural, like the coronavirus is an extension of nature as much as the leads outside of my window. Like just it is an enemy. It's because it's because it's a it's an existential threat. Right. But to college it in political terms, let alone racial terms, is absolutely that's yet crazy and that's certain. Yeah, That's what Ahab was all about, was like like projecting all of his inabilities to find peace within himself onto this thing that he would he would literally take down his ship and all its crew in order for him to get salvation from that confrontation. God, it does feel oddly related, doesn't it, Because when I when I look at the incredibly unfortunate circumstance of us being supposedly led by a quote leader, but who exhibits nothing but a repeated dereliction of duty, This desire to make foreign m HM a virus, this desire to you know, when a when a reporter asks why we're not testing. We need to be testing. The lack of testing and the lack of contact tracing is making the United States fall victim to this virus in a way that no other country has. We have the largest numbers in the world. It's incredibly scary. And and he his responses asked China, It's like, what does that even mean? And you know the again, the conspiracy theories that have come out, people saying, well, you know the lab in Wuhan. I want to be like, hey, guys, you know there were eleven there's eleven labs around the world studying coronaviruses, and we study them as a team. You know, we we fund these governments in every country to have their best researchers studying the kinds of zoonotic viruses that make people sick, like, you know, so that we don't have another plague, viruses like stars, things that are incredibly dangerous to all of humanity. And and he has this weird thing it seems to me as an observer where if he can make it someone else's fault, he doesn't have to take responsibility for not leading. You know. It's it's almost like a parent whose kid falls down and breaks their arm because they weren't looking, and they say, well, this other parent was distracting me, And it's like, what does that even mean? Take your kid to the hospital. Why are we having this conversation? Completely irrelevant, it's completely irrelevant. And yet it's it's stunning that in his mind, uh, it's the most important thing that then it's that this has nothing to do with me. I mean just certainly said that's what he's saying, right, he's saying this has nothing to do with me. Well, and saying it from a place where he and everyone else in the White House get tested every day, where we've we've now learned that everyone in the White House is required to wear a mask uh in in in in the White House on property and around him, But he won't wear a mask because he doesn't want to be seen doing so because again he thinks that makes him look weak or something, Whereas it's just what scientists are asking us to do. And you know, you see these poor these poor team members. You know, I just feel for Dr Fauci so much right now. You know, his trying to stay in good enough graces that he can remain in his position so that he can advise Americans, but also having to constantly clean up you know, this mess. It just it's so strange, and it it does. I hadn't thought about the parallel, uh to this current experience that we're all in together and and the kind of experience of the crew on Moby Dick's ship, but I am certainly thinking about it now. Well, it's it's a it's a it's a constant American. I mean, you know the story of racism the United States, uh, you know, whether it's the US Mexican border, or the Chinese Exclusion Act or the interment of Japanese Americans and Mansanar in other camps. Um. Speaking of which, the very first border fence was made, uh, like the first official border fence was made with the materials taken down after World War Two from a Japanese American internment camp. I want you to think about that for a minute, that the very material of the border wall separating United States and Mexico came from a Japanese American camp that was used to enclose American citizens, and that a later iteration was metal sheets that were left over from the Vietnam War. So the actual even the materiality of the fence is ingrained, an ingrained history of xenophobia and fear. And um, it's it's it's a consistent within American history. I mean, it's you know, it's not all of American history. But you don't have to dig very deep to find it, and and you don't have to dig very deep to relate it to the comments that the President made. It's all part and parcel of a kind of an underlying panic that somehow America is always under threat well, and that somehow we have to always be afraid of the other. When what does that even mean? Right? This this idea of otherism is so strange to me, as a huge species, It's so strange to me. It's it is it isn't it is hard word for it on some level, but but it is it. I mean, that's that's why all of this this misinformation works, right, It's just immediately plugs into our our sensibilities that we're under attack. I mean, I keep on going back to like some some in all of us, there's the we're afraid of the big bear coming into the interest of the cave. Like I think, like human beings, there's it just depends on where that pressure point is. But at some point we just panic. We lose all sense of of rational thought and empathy and compassion, and we just we just seek some kind of shelter or protection and we don't care what the consequences are. And that's just a that's a horrible position to still have in the in the contemporary world, when we have such access to raw power in terms of you know, um, internet data and nuclear weapons and you know, all sorts of commodities and the way we farm, like we have so much power and and it's the flip of a switch. If it's motivated by panic and fear, we're screwed because it affects ever. And again that goes back to your observation. There's just no such thing as a periphery. So it's funny because in going from that series into your present project, you know, talking about the work at the US Mexico border and how you've incorporated it into your art, it feels silly because I feel like we're already in it, We're already talking about it. It's it's always been there in a way. And you know you mentioned being acutely aware of the reality and the duality even as a child. When when did you decide to take all of that experience, those observations and actually begin creating these specific projects that went on the border, um, you know, to to great extent. I was when I got preoccupied with satellite you know, Google Earth, and started looking at the way Google because Google Earth is fascinating because you can see the Earth both, you know, without international boundaries, without cities, without any kind of documentation, and it looks one way. And then you overlay all that stuff and then you just see how all of this line drawing and all of this, you know, two great and compositional formatting creates a bigger reality than the Earth as its as its own thing. Right it used to be where boundaries were all natural, right, Well, there's those mountains behind us, and you know, really am in this valley and that river is where the next people let start, right, And there's always been inner tribal conflict, but it's always been through natural boundaries and kind of an understanding of place is a real place. Well, what what I started being fascinated by was with Sella photography, you could just see how completely abstract and absurd a lot of these boundaries are. And uh, you know in this straight line which is half of the Mexican US Mexico border, which was drawn with a pencil, or the Middle East, right, the entire Middle East was pretty much drawn into existence around nineteen nineteen, and you know, look at a look at the conflicts that happened. You have you know to some two great extent nomadic people's who are moving across borders, moved across or just spaces now of a sudden, they're moving across borders. Uh. So that that when I started looking at that those satellite maps, it started we thinking in terms of art and in terms of with within Within the history of abstract painting, there's been always this idea that it was sort of utopian and sort of host national list, meaning that abstraction was a language and you were mentioning albers has been a big influence on my work at the At the core of Alberts idea is this idea that shapes and color can speak for themselves, and that they don't have an agenda. They don't have a national agenda, they don't have a you know, everyone sees a shape, everyone sees a color, and they all see it equally. What what what I started to think about was how you could take that those same types of forms and digressions and they could be kind of sinister. Write a line, when is the when are you? What do you? When do you ever fear? Aligned? Well, when you cross the border right the minute any one of us crosses the border, we somehow feel differently. I always find that fascinating. I remember once being an Ecuador and you know, they has a little place it's kind of like four corners right where you can put one ft in northern hemisphere, and you know, I'm standing in the middle of the earth, and it's such a bizarre thing, and it's completely untrue because it's like you're you know, there's no middle of the earth right that it's a global it's a sphere, So how can there be a middle but we think of in those terms because of the poles, and again it's an opposition by polar opposition creates the hemispheres. The hemispheres create the hemisphere line, and the line creates difference. So when all of those things started to move into how I think about abstract painting, and the more I began to think, like with Trump's prototypes, they're they're thirty by thirty ft squares right there, purely almost platonic forms, and the square used in art has always been kind of liberating, right It's a way of thinking about, you know, a modular unit that's sort of mathematical, like math has thought it as being pure. And when I started seeing those squares on those prototypes, they seemed very much a part of a utopian ideal of geometry, but in practice were very sinister. And that's so the whole border theory project has been about sort of relate, relating the abstract with with the political. It's a great extent and and where those things interact, how personal does that feel for you? Well, it it's it is definitely, it's it's uh. It's an intellectual exercise to a great extent. Its instances aesthetic exercise. But um, the reason I started focusing on going to the border and moving away from satellite imagery is it all of a sudden it felt it felt it felt a little fake, right, It felt a little like too removed. Here I am a studio making foot taking photographs from satellite and I'm making these pain meetings based on it. That felt a little strange after a while, and then I started saying, I really need to spend more time at the border documenting with my own photography. And then, you know, it wasn't too much later that I'm at you know, I'm in the refugee camp uh in Tijuana, at the Manitoarez Sports Complex, seeing the real ramifications of all this stuff and incorporating that into my work. So I like to think of my work as being something that is honest in the sense that I am I'm not inherently a political activists, but I am absolutely connected to do it on whatever level that relates to the border. And also I am at a distance of three hund miles and being in Los Angeles, having my student Los Angeles. I'm not at the border on every day. I'm not I'm not someone who lives at the border right there. There are are artists that that grew up in Tijuana and went to school in San Diego right uh in the seventies, and those people they have a very different relationship to the word than I do. I'm trying to be honest about Like, I'm only a quarter Mexican, so I take that into account, right, It's like, it's not an autobiographical project. It's not a political project exclusively. It's part of someone who has spent their lives thinking of the sells them taking myself as an artist who takes into account the kind of obvious and subtle ways in which I've been informed by by the border. Well, and to be able to examine the ways in which you are of something and also removed from it, you know too, two things in that way can be true simultaneously. And and what I think is so interesting about it as a person who also grew up in Los Angeles, I I have friends who, by the way, grew up in Tijuana. We're going to school in San Diego. Um, so I of their experience, but again I am not of it, and I I don't have a personal, you know, experience in my family of the U s Mexico relationship. But I have personal experience of immigration, being that my grandmother came to the US from Italy on a boat, you know, came through Ellis Island. My dad immigrated here in the late sixties and became a citizen in the nineties. Um So it's interesting to realize that we all have these touch points, you know, we all have these degrees of closeness and separation to what being a citizen means, what being a neighbor means, what being an immigrant means. You know, many of these things are true for us simultaneously. And and why I enjoy having conversations like this and viewing art like yours is because I think, okay, it matters that we get still and check in with what all of this means, with what we might consider to be existing in our periphery, which is in fact not it is. You know, we we are, to your point, on this plane together. And and I think there are so many things that do depersonalize that, you know, the the satellite imagery is easier to look at than the neighbor who is threatened in a way that I am not. So whatever can bring us back to each other feels very exciting to me and important, and it's and it's and it's uh inexhaustible. It's it's beautifully inexhaustible. Right, you don't get tired of it because it's a it's a it's a compass heading and it and it just always allows you to focus on your starting point but not necessarily know where the endpoint is. And I think as creators, we this is where intuition is so important. I never questioned why this was something worth my while. I never thought, oh, I need to do something that's pseudo political, and you know, I never And it just felt right because it felt like it was meeting a lot of different needs within my psyche and within within my emotional state about reconciling where I am with who I am, with what I like and what I'm interested in. And so anyone who has a chance to do that, I think has the greatest It's just it's just incredibly profound. You you've said that you've found that this line that divides our two countries is something that we need to examine beyond culture and politics. And yet here we are having such deep conversation about both culture and politics. So what do you mean by that when when you when you say you want to look beyond that, where where do we look? Well, it's funny. I mean, in January, a colleague and I started recording the border. We started going down and I'm very hostile to the idea that all the information we get about the border is through news, you know, newscasts and news feeds and topical stories. The people that live along the border, um, it's in many cases their backyard. And I find it fascinating that the farther you are away from the US Mexican border, that there's a tendency to be more uh xenophobic. The closer you get to the board, people tend to be like, think it's ridiculous and disgraceful that there is a border that if you live in in the a West or like you think of this as a as an absolutely antagonistic relationship. So a lot of my work is about kind of moving away from that h polarized way of thinking about it. So what going down to the border to record, and what we're trying to do is use the sounds that you would never associate with the border, Things that things that wou that are just there, but they are never revealed because of the politics of the situation, right Uh, I mean I was struck with the very first thing. The very first thing we recorded was a swarm of bees along a creek that runs parallel to the border. Like when I thought about, oh I'm gonna record, I'm gonna go down the border. One of my first thing on the record, we purposely avoided the border checkpoints and we went to some more remote stretches and just to kind of cat make catalogs of sounds that were that were there. There are things that need people need to hear so that we sort of module are are thinking of. It was something a lot more I was used more poetic, but but it definitely like puts us in a different mindset well and somehow more natural, something more about the ecosystem, something more about the EBB and flow that existed to your point before we tore down internment camps and put up a border wall. I'm struck by conversations I've heard along you know, the border fence in those cities, the music that you get to listen to. Um there, to your point, there's so much that is not systematized and um about checking papers and we just we don't often get shown those things. Yeah, I mean, we we put contact mix on the border because of these the steel ballard, the sort of fifteen twenty ft long hollow steel posts. So listening, I mean, you know, it's it's it was very meaningful to me to listen to the wind hitting the tops of the posts and having that sound travel down inside the tubes of the steel supports recording those as you know, as as as important as the images of the border are, the physicality of it, the sort of texture of that space can can can be describing a lot of different types of ways. And um, you know, listening, you know, and we're talking about how Komba this this sort of town that was cut in half by the border. We recorded the town, the twin towns, how koombey and Kumbabacher across from each other, separated by the wall. We recorded the morning, like uh, the dawn between the two cities and hearing you know, roosters on one side and uh, you know, traffic on one side, Like just hearing this both cities rise at the same time. It was just really wonderful and and uh, yeah, there is a natural nous there that has to be understood because it counteracts the weight of of the border as a systemized enforcement of difference. We have to remind ourselves of it as an as a place of a continuum, and if we don't do that, then we lose sight of its true nature. Continueum, I really like that. And there's this great artists that have that have really worked with with that. I mean, I don't know if you saw the Teeter Totter Wall that Ronald Real did. Um. He's a professor of architecture at Berkeley, and he has a wonderful look called border Wallace Architecture, and it's all of these designers and architects thinking of different ways to re envision the border for example, to build a border wallace architecture. And he invited uh many many designers and architects to sort of reconfigure the space and you have all these different ideas of what the border could be. His was the Teeter Totter Wall, and he was actually made that right, used to use the border as a as a fulcrum for for play and for communications. But others have designed like libraries, right, like you make the space a place that's a library where you where both sides could come and and talk interface. Uh, have have places to calm down, read like you could. You could make the porter could be so much more interesting and so much more to its actual I don't know, to a more generous self than it is. We've taken it to the end extreme of military fortress. We can still have the United States in Mexico. That's not the question. The question is, you know, people always kind of like, well, you either have a wall or it's open borders, right, It's like it's got to be one or the other. But the fact is that, you know, we could devise systems that allow for community I think of national communities rather than national players. When when you think about that militarization, I'm I'm curious. You've been working on this project for a long time now, and obviously in the last four years with the Trump administration taking ahold of the country. Have the policies that we've seen changing the um intensification and of border trauma, the separation of families at the border. I have those things affected your work with the wall, both in your access to it and in your perspective of it. Oh? Yeah, I mean it's it's those situations. I mean, it's a human tragedy, and my my impulse is that the best reaction to it is immediate action. It's not to make art, right, we volunteer. You give money to like border angels and group different groups that you know, uh, you know places that that you need money just to have water for for migrants crossing in the middle of death days of way stations that with Yeah, the most simple things, right, like like uh, fifty gallon barrels of water with flags attached to it, so that people know that that's a place where they can get water as they cross the United States. Art seems really feeble in comparison to to direct human tragedy, right, So that aspect of of of my relationship is very different than the making our part. But some of the images I did have taken of, say the refugee camps, it has it has made itself into my work mainly as a way of dispelling the way in which like journalistic photographers frame everything. So journalists often look for them the sound bite photograph, right, they look for the way in which you could say, here's all the information in one photograph and it looks very um and because these these these people are so good as photographers. It often looks oddly aestheticized, like it's it. I don't know how it's funny. Human beings we we we react to tragedy based on empathy often can be exploited in art in such a way where your pain is greater than their pain. I don't know, Like, I don't know how to explain. It's like you wound up, you wind up feeling bad. Really, there's only one thing that happens. Their situation needs to be better, right, you need we need to address some of these situations immediately. There's situations all over the world. The best thing to do is to donate if you have money, right to two NGOs and two two organizations as directly there. That's they're gonna do. There's gonna be a lot more work than anything I do. However, there are artists that to take a more confidential, confrontational approach with political activism. Um And one thing I've learned from uh these artists group called post Commodity, is that they really believe that if you're going to make work about the border, you actually do have to interface significantly with communities along the border. So that's something I've I've definitely started to incorporate into the work more is not just seeing it solely from a kind of aesthetic view, but also really start to incorporate the voices at the border. It is a never ending project, right um and and again, the further you get into it, the more the more wonderful and subtle it is. But also the voices can get much louder and more emphatic. And that's something that I'm continuing to work on, and it is a it is a balance between immediate aid action activism and the expression that you, as an individual feel called to create. I do think that to your point, a lot of people get desensitized to these photojournalist images, not to say they aren't beautiful or important. They are, but when we see so much of something, we can begin to dull to it. Which takes me back to what I was explaining to the listeners at the beginning of this conversation, this magnetic draw that I had to your work at the Annenberg Space, and it makes me think, you know, art has the power to change minds in a way at times that other mediums just can't. They don't they don't cut to the emotional core and then open us to the emotional experience of the subject in the piece. Why do you think that art can be such a great mind changer or mind opener. I'm primarily because it's deductive in a way that few things are. H I I feel like when i'm I'm literally trying to seduce the viewer to look at the work. I often one of my main strategies is to make something interesting enough and visually interesting enough to to let you give you a moment to look a little deeper. So like when you were saying you you were attracted to the color right in in those Paranoide architecture people, that was intentional. That's exactly what I wanted to have happened. I wanted you to not know that it was about the border. I wanted you to just sort of be drawn to it. And then, as you said, the very steps that you were talking about, the more that you saw the central images, did you realize, oh my god, this is about this is into something else. And that's that's what art can do. It's not give you the obvious picture. I can give you the important picture. What we confuse obvious from portant all the time, and and and it are never dwells ever, dwells on the obvious that aren't always dwells on the the latent. You know what, what what comes after the second, third, fourth, fifth movement and work? And I think with that too. Unlike a lot of forms of communication, art can continue to resonate even when you're not around it. You know, photograph or a good film or a good piece of music and linger in your mind. Not just because it's catchy, although that does happen too, but it can linger because you still have questions about it. Why Why did that? Why? Why was it that? Why did that? Artists decide to take Trump's prototype walls and turn them into kind of a weird abstract theater of color like why, And so that that feedback with then the mind and the viewer um creates a virtual rereading of the experience, and and so you walk away with having more questions and answers. That's what art's good at. And that's why I love it, you know, I mean, that's it fulfills that that otherwise troubling relationship with information and experience and quick on a on a more consistent note of sustainability and regeneration. I love I love that about art did too the intimacy of it really, because what's interesting is whether you you use the word seductive. To me, art feels so intimate and all of those words are representative of a space that is within you know that that really is personal, that is in the heart and the body. And I think about a way that it can put us inside of ourselves and also put the subjects inside of us. It creates a closeness when you think about that closeness, the intimate experience that people have when they are viewing your art. When you're working on a series, do you do you think about how people will interpret it? Can you not be bothered to do that? Do you want people to interpret your work in their own way or are you really hoping that they will see it in the way that you see it? What? What is that experience like as an artist? Uh? You know, Uh, I like it when I'm impressed by my own work. And by that I don't mean by like in an ego sense, like literally, I love the moment when I like, I'll work in the studio for hours and I go, Jesus, I'm like, I'm not I don't know what I'm doing. It's it's just it just feels like an incredible up and struggle, and I'll come back the next day and it's like like you know, a genie had put something magical on the wall, Like it feels. It feels as if I didn't make it. It feels as if it came out from some other source. And when I get that real like sort of ecstatic idea that the things I've been working on, when looked, look refreshing rather than oh, it's exactly the way I wanted it to look. So I have you know, you have to you have to not look at your work to see it. Ah Uh. You have to put it away mentally and visually sometimes in order just to be have a fresh look at it. And then if it does impress you, not because of your skills, but because it just it sort of has its own relational harmony, It has its own little dance that's doing on his own. That that's when I feel really gratified, because I know that's what's gonna happen to other people. And that's a very subjective thing. But you know, with enough making of art, one begins to trust. Uh, your little victory laps uh that you get from seeing your own work, like you you see, oh, this is this is this is a work that's thriving. Right, It's it's self propelled. And when I when I see that happening, I know that that's going to happen for other people like that that that parent architecture was a series. This is my first digital series, right, I've never really worked with photoshop to that extent, combined photography with it. But when I when I, when I started getting towards the final result, it seemed like I was sort of fascinated by it. It seemed like a kind of like an alternative portfolio I'd find in a library from a completely different culture. Like it felt very strange, but it felt very attractive. And once they knew that started to happen, I realized that I was on something that other people could access to. It's it's it's all are making artists about about finding um People say it's like finding your own voice, and I really don't like that. I think it's more like finding your own ear. It's like the echo. Your voice does its thing independent of you, but if it here it sounds good after it bounces off against the wall, then it's good. Like finding your ear is really where it's at that's really interesting. Well, I for one can confirm how you know, striking the experience was, because now I have four of those pieces up in my home. Perfect. Yeah, it's very it's very cool. I'm very very proud to on them. I'm very honored things. So when we talk about this project, you know, the photographs of the wall, samples, the recordings that you're taking. Um, some of the things I was able to see when I came to tour your studio. What how would you describe this project that you are working on now? Where where is this leading you? That's interesting? Well? This this this sound the sound works are very important. Um, the idea that this is going to be this uh uh. I have visions of of of cutting an album, right because I think records are kind of fascinating as objects that evoke sound. Using the border recordings and we're going to play with them, we're not going to make music. We are trying to make and they're not field recording, So we're going to try and do something that's a hybrid where the sound of the border is extracted. Is it creates like an environment in the sense that you can you could listen to this and experience the border without it being physically in front of you, which is the same quality that the works on paper and paintings have, Like how do you experience something without photography or without you know, film, Like, how do you experience it as my experience through you know, the way I see the border. So the projects are in a way, I've been thinking a lot more about bringing the physicality of the border to you personally, and so one the last a couple of visits was I started taking these these small boulders from the border and putting them in my studio and uh, thinking about casting them out of steel so that they are the same material as the border, but have the same shape and crags and crevices of the actual thing. So there's a there's a idea of the site non site, the idea of that there's a sort of space of documentation but also a space of presence. Even though they are you know, miles and miles and miles apart, they still describe each other completely. So all the work is getting into some extent more of like weirdly, more archaeological or more um. Yeah, So the the paintings I'm working on now are images of the ground like through these odd, very dry photographs of literally the border itself, like the ground at the border, and then through a combination of photography and painting, I'm making them in these kind of like almost radioactive spaces that the psychically dense spaces, and the college was pushed, the linear movements are pushed so that you're in first glance, they look like abstract paintings, but they and they're very vibrant, but really there their documents of the border itself, and not just the border, but also my experience of the border. So everything is starting to have this kind of smaller view um kind of a more of a microscopic view of the land itself. I mean, one of the oddest experiences I had a few months ago was, you know, they're continually building new stretches of border wall and I was able to we we went to a section which for some reason nobody was there, where there was a fence that just ended, and then there were trenches where new concrete is going to be poured and new fences are going to be installed. And I was able to get inside those trenches, like literally to be in the border and take photographs of this sort of weird channel that, for all intensive purposes is the exact delineation of the United States and Mexico. And you know, so what do I do with those I I try, I try and figure out ways in which taking this information bringing it back to the viewer in a space that's very, very far away from the actual event. Um so yeah, I mean, it's it's a It's the most time I spend down there, the more my relationship changes to it, the more subtle my ears and eyes are, and the more I'm interested in, ah, seeing it as a natural environment and less as a political an oppressive political uh delineation. I'm interested in that with the people I meet too. So you know, we're going to start a project on interviews that people live on the border, trying to figure out ways to make a sort of communion between It's just sort of the heal that the border has often been talked about as a scar, right, like a physical scar in the earth, in the sense that the wound is the is the division of the two countries. The border is a scar. How do you heal a scar? Art is the way to heal a scar. It start doesn't go away necessarily, You're not going to get the same skin that you have. It's not gonna happen, but that you through art you can you can, if not outright heal, you can approach the possibility of healing. And all the all the artists I know that work along the border, that is their goal. So it's sort of alleviate some of the trauma that that exists there to approach the possibility of healing. Feel really yeah, because we're not got you know, we're not politicians, we're not policymakers, can't make it go away, and but we all have the possibility of signaling a better way, in a better way, of a more generous way and more kinder way. Um. Art is always pushed, has been progressive in interesting ways, right, not always. You know, art revolutionizes the world very in a way to very differently than political revolutions, but it is just as effective. Yeah, I mean, historically art has often created the personal emotions necessary to shift policy. Culture. Culture sets policy so exactly. So that's and we forget that, you know, we put so much emphasis on the political, but everyone can participate in rearranging our thought process so that we can accommodate a better vision for the future. But it's it's you know, you can't just say it, you have to you have to feel it. You can't even just think it, you have to feel it. And that's where art comes in. I love that. So when you think about all of this, where you are, what you're working on, the personal, the political, the intersections of all of them, the professional, When you think about having a conversation on a platform titled work in progress, I'm curious, what in this moment feels like a work in progress in your life right now? Wow? Can you sort of reframe that a little bit? Because I just wonder, you know, because the phrase I almost think about mad libs, you know, the phrase work in progress always brings something to mind for people. And so as we sat in this space, you know, we've talked about a lot um across personal, professional, political lenses, and I'm just curious what what feels like a work in progress to you right now in any of those spaces I have. You know, it's I have a lot of faith in the notion of professionalism. When I saw some of those um people come up and testifying Congress, the one thing I was just blown away by was the quality of some of these people that testified about the you know, the Biden the Biden Gate or where you want to call it, and they were and that the woman that was a forget her name, the woman was the ambassador was not ambassador, but yeah, attache to the Ukraine, who was so articulate and so focused about what she was doing that the work in progress for me, that it I'm reminded of is holding yourself to a really high standard of professionalism in a world that wants to be like basically usurved by hacks. You know, like I feel like I feel like attention to detail, attention to focus um and keeping keeping this sense that what I'm about and what I'm doing the standard of it is the kind of standard that I would I would hope everyone approaches within their own realms and whatever profession, whether they're the parents or whatever. It's like, really define what's valuable and really defined your method. Your method and your value have to be, you know, they have to be part and parcel of the same objective and and not and we fore we tend to focus on one or the other. What's my method um that we have it has to match and that's where professionalism comes in. Right to be a true professional means here is my goal and this is the way I do it, and those two maximize my voice and maximize my sound, and the work in progress then becomes as long as I get more information and new experiences, really focus on what is it that I'm doing that is right there with my aims and my experiences, how the message come across in a way that's is clean and effective and lean, so that I don't fall into stereotypes, even my own stereotypes. It's so easy to fall in your own stereotypes, and I'm always always working against that is what professionalism is that I mean, I'm it. One of the things I'm impressed about your your podcast is like and I and I'm so honored to be as part of this incredibly large net that you are the greatest fisherman I've ever seen. The way that you you you you are able to throw out both the multiplicity of voices, like you want to hear what people have to say, and at the same time you allow for a kind of constant within each interview with each podcast, so that we always feel as if we know where we stand and we know that uh, it's going to be something that is beautifully uh, possible for us to digest, like like really consume it in a really healthy way. Yeah, that's tricky, you know, not everyone can do that, to take that big thing and that intimate thing and have him as part of the same meal. That's really kind Tony. Thank you. I think to your point that rigorous self examination, the always checking in to make sure you're not dusty or that you haven't succumbed to some you know, subconscious or cultural stereotype, that that you're interacting with humanity and listening. That's that's the exercise of this. That's that's the joy in this for me is always being able to get out, you know, and and then to really dig in. It feels um like a great shaking off, but also I hope um like a tender and safe space too examine together and if that, if that's what we're doing here, then I'm thrilled. Yeah. No, it is very much like what you're doing is very much in the spirit of an artistic process, right, which is your intuition guides you to to move to a certain location or had in a certain direction, and then once once you're there, you don't say, here's what I want to do. With you. You say, look, how can we figure out where we are because we both arrived at this place independently and now we're together in this one place, and what can come out of that? That is essentially the studio experience. I love that. Wow, I wanna you know, I always want to come hang at the studio so that that feels really that feels really cool. Oh yeah, I know. You know, sometimes I love having people come over when I work because it's a lot of my work is very sort of pedantic and you're just sort of like you're doing one thing and you're you know, it doesn't take a lot of super focus. And it's always fun to have conversations while I'm doing that because I know that for people who think of artists and otherwise wise mystical process, right, like the magic that happens in the studio, a lot of it is really just beautifully mundane, And to have conversations with people and to let them into that that sacred space is really it's really liberating for me because you know, oftentimes it's just I'm alone. That's so cool. This show is executive produced by me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna, our associate producer is Kate Linlee, our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by Grilliant Anatomy