ON VIEW AT CAFE HAMMER
REBECA MÉNDEZ
April 26 -May 30, 2012

Eight single channel video works by Rebeca Méndez are on view at Cafe Hammer from April 26 through May 30, 2012. The 50-minute program features works captured on 16mm film in Iceland, the Svalbard archipelago in the High Arctic, the Atacama desert in Chile, and White Sands and Death Valley in the United States.

The works on display are:
Nothing Further Happens, 2011
Never Happened Again – Glaciers 2, 2010; – Kárahnjúkar, 2010; – Eucalyptus, 2010
At Any Given Moment – Grass 2, 2010; – FALL 1, 2010; – RIVER 2, 2010; – GRASS 1, 2009

Rebeca Méndez was born in Mexico City and received her MFA from Art Center College of Design. She is a professor in the department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA. Her work has been shown at ARCO Madrid 29th International Art Fair; X Biennial, Cuenca, Ecuador; the National Design Triennial, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca; the Williamson Gallery, Pasadena; the Broad Art Center, UCLA; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Méndez is recipient of the 2010 California Community Foundation Mid Career Fellowship for Visual Artists, is included in the Artist Pension Trust, México City, and has been awarded the 2012 Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design.

Méndez’s art practice is in various media—photography, 16mm film, video, and installation—with which she explores the nature of perception and media representation, specifically how cultures express themselves through the style of nature that they produce at a given time and the medium through which they construct this nature. She moves through different scales with ease—from photographic prints, to immersive sound and video installations, to murals of more than 25,000 square feet, to installations involving sixty-foot boulders and tons of lava rock. She considers the journey as a medium in itself and has produced a significant body of work based on travels to unfamiliar and extreme places, where she is awakened to a heightened level of perception.

Méndez’s interest in the nature of matter—in cycles and systems, specifically the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions that make natural phenomena emerge—stem from her growing up in two seemingly entropic environments, Mexico City and the Mexican jungle, where she would follow her father in pursuit of Mayan archaeology. Common to both environments is hypercomplexity, multiplicity, and constant change. Méndez’s move to Los Angeles and her expeditions to geologically young Iceland and the severe high arctic have furthered this impetus.

Méndez’s work is driven by the concept of élan vital, developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who described it as “the explosive internal force that life carries within itself,” which he claimed animates all being. Her At Any Given Moment series is further informed by the ideas of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who said: “We are all transistors, in the literal sense. People always think they are in the world, but they never realize that they are the world.” As explained by cultural theorist Sanford Kwinter, what Stockhausen means is that there are no phenomena in the natural world that do not manifest themselves as vibratory or rhythmic phenomena. Those vibrations attack us; they modulate us and, in the end, become us.

Between 2010 and 2011, artists collective Machine Project produced more than seventy-five on-site programs and installations for the Hammer Museum’s Public Engagement Artist-in-Residence (A.I.R.) program. During the residency, Machine Project examined and utilized nontraditional spaces like the museum’s lobby, a central staircase, and even the coatroom. It also investigated different ideas of audiences—from intimate, focused performances for one or two audience members to dispersed, ambient spatial pieces with no formal audience. Highlights of the residency include an overnight Dream-In in connection with the Hammer’s exhibition The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology, Live Personal Soudnt, in which visitors were presented with the option of “checking out” a musician to follow them around the exhibition while playing live music that only that visitor could hear through headphones; Houseplant Vacation, in which visitors were invited to bring their houseplants to the museum for a month long cultural retreat; and a set of tennis tables that activated our terrace with people and sound. (The last work, Sound piece for the Hammer Museum, 2010, was acquired by the museum and still resides on the terrace.)

Now, a year later, we offer a report on the residency, co-authored with Machine Project. In an effort to embrace institutional transparency and reflection, this report describes the process, implementation, strategies, and challenges that arose during the year-long residency. Through essays, interviews with artists and staff, and descriptions of the projects with visitor responses, the report illuminates our practical and theoretical questions and approaches. As we all look toward the future of museum practice and audience engagement, we hope this report will be a valuable tool to other arts institutions and artists seeking to undertake similar initiatives.

The Hammer Museum’s Public Engagement program seeks to create a new kind of interactive museum: an artist-driven visitor engagement program that encourages contact among visitors, artists, and Museum staff, and activates spaces in imaginative ways.

Public Engagement and AIR were established in 2009 thanks to a James Irvine Foundation Arts Innovation Fund grant. Via AIR, artists examine and respond to fundamental museum issues related to the visitor experience in an attempt to deepen the Hammer’s connection with its guests.

MON | APR 16 | 7PM | HAMMER SCREENINGS

ARARAT

Atom Egoyan’s award-winning Ararat is based loosely on the Siege of Van during the Armenian Genocide. While exploring the human impact of that specific historical event, the film also examines the nature of truth and its representation through art. Starring Charles Aznavour, Christopher Plummer, and David Alpay, Ararat was awarded Best Film on Human Rights by the Political Film Society of Hollywood and the Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review in New York. (2002, Dir. Atom Egoyan, 115 min.)

A Q&A with actor David Alpay (“Raffi”) will follow the screening.

TUE | APR 17 | 7PM | HAMMER SCREENINGS

SCREAMERS

The documentary Screamers chronicles Grammy Award-winning rock band System of a Down’s efforts to persuade both the British and U.S. governments to recognize the Armenian Genocide. The film explores why genocides repeat and features interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning activist Samantha Power; survivors from Turkey, Rwanda, and Darfur; FBI whistleblowers, and Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in Turkey after appearing in the film. (2006, Dir. Carla Garapedian, 91 min.)

A Q&A with filmmaker Carla Garapedian will follow the screening

SUN | APR 22 | 3PM | HAMMER CONVERSATIONS

ATOM EGOYAN & SERJ TANKIAN

Introduction by Eric Esrailian, Vice-Chief, Division of Digestive Diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and member of the Hammer Board of Directors.

Atom Egoyan’s critically acclaimed films include Chloe, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and the award-winning Ararat, a meditation on the Armenian Genocide. His work has been featured in international retrospectives including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Venice Biennale. Serj Tankian is a Lebanese-born Armenian American activist and musician best known for his work with the rock band System of a Down. Tankian and Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello co-founded the nonprofit activist organization Axis of Justice. In 2011 Tankian was awarded the Armenian Prime Minister’s Medal for his contributions to the recognition of the Armenian Genocide and the advancement of music.

Last spring artist Lisa Anne Auerbach trained as a Hammer security guard to gain insight on the role of guards at the museum. She subsequently worked shifts in the galleries that informed her Public Engagement project, United We Stand. For her subtle intervention, Auerbach replaced the guards’ standard blazers with a new set, tailored for each guard and bearing a slogan on the back related to standing. She honed in on standing as she found it to be a definitive element of her experience as a guard, physically taxing and particular to the guards’ job at the museum.

“I wanted my project to both call attention to the personality and humanity of the guard and to encourage viewers to consider one aspect of their daily experience, that of standing,” says Auerbach. “At the same time, my goal was to respect the anonymity of guards who did not want to feel like they were on display and to retain what several identified as a comfortable and authoritative part of their daily uniform: the blue blazer.”
While on duty in the galleries, guards can choose whether or not to show visitors their sequins by the way they position themselves in relation to the walls, choosing and changing their level of participation in this project.

“It is my hope that this slight intervention will allow visitors the ability to understand a bit about the guard’s daily experience and personality and to consider the guard’s role within the museum,” says Auerbach.

The blazers have become “a real conversation starter,” notes Alan, a Hammer Guard who came to the museum in the midst of the project. Blanca, a seven year veteran of the security staff, says “guests go from post to post, just to find out what they say.”

The phrases were selected by the guards and transferred onto the garments in their own handwriting. Guards will wear the blazers throughout the museum until the end of April, though some have expressed an interest in wearing them beyond then.

“It’s something different, very unusual,” considers Hammer guard Marzena. “Finally the visitors are paying attention.”

Learn more

Photography by Stephanie Keenan.

The Hammer Museum’s Public Engagement program seeks to create a new kind of interactive museum: an artist-driven visitor engagement program that encourages contact among visitors, artists, and Museum staff, and activates spaces in imaginative ways.

Public Engagement was established in 2009 thanks to a James Irvine Foundation Arts Innovation Fund grant. Via Public Engagement, artists examine and respond to fundamental museum issues related to the visitor experience in an attempt to deepen the Hammer’s connection with its guests.

The Hammer Museum is pleased to announce the establishment of the Mohn Prize in conjunction with the inauguration of Made in L.A. 2012. Funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, the $100,000 prize will be awarded to an artist from the exhibition and will be accompanied by the publication of a book on the finalist’s work. The Mohn Prize follows in the tradition of the Tate’s Turner Prize and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Bucksbaum Award. However it is differentiated in one significant way: while a professional jury will select five finalists for the Mohn Prize, the winner will be chosen by visitors to the exhibition through online voting.

THE MOHN PRIZE
All sixty artists in all three venues of Made in L.A. 2012 are eligible to win the Mohn Prize. The professional jury who will select the finalists is comprised of peers from the contemporary art world around the country, including independent curator and writer Anthony Huberman, Doryun Chong Associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Cecilia Alemani, the Curator and Director of High Line Art Program; and Rita Gonzalez, curator of contemporary art at LACMA. The significant cash prize will be accompanied by a limited edition mongraphic volume on the winning artist’s work. Jarl and Pamela Mohn’s commitment to the prize extends through the first five cycles of Made in L.A. with the option to continue beyond. The jury and public are both asked to select the artist whose presentation of work stands out as exceptional in Made in L.A. 2012.

FIVE FINALISTS AND PUBLIC VOTING FOR THE MOHN PRIZE
The five finalists selected by the jury will be announced on June 28 at a Hammer Bash!—a public event celebrating the exhibition—and voting will commence immediately. Visitors to the exhibition will register to vote onsite at either the Hammer Museum or the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and may only vote once they are registered (photo ID will be required). This process insures that each voter has actually attended the exhibition and that each person can only cast one vote. The Hammer is working with Trofee, a state certified digital voting platform, used by organizations such as UCLA and The Emmy Awards. This platform has the highest levels of security to ensure that the voting is secure and the results are authenticated. Voting will end on August 12 and the finalist will be announced soon after.

JARL MOHN
Jarl and Pamela Mohn are art collectors committed to supporting emerging L.A. artists. Professionally, Jarl Mohn divides his time between being a corporate director and advisor to a number of media companies, making direct early stage angel and seed investments in digital media/technology ventures, and managing The Mohn Family Foundation—the philanthropic entity he and his wife created in 2000. In addition to supporting arts initiatives, the Mohn Family Foundation funded the Mohn Broadcast Center for KPCC, a significant contribution to Public Radio in Southern California.

Previously he was the founding President and CEO of Liberty Digital, a public company that invested in interactive television, cable networks, and the internet. Prior to Liberty Digital, Jarl created E! Entertainment Television serving as its President and CEO from January 1990 to December 1998. Mohn was formerly Executive Vice President and General Manager of MTV and VH1 from 1986 to 1990 where he led the transformation from music videos to long form programming. Prior to his career in television, Mohn had a 19 year career in radio. He began as a disc jockey and moved through the ranks as a programmer, general manager, and then owner of a group of radio stations.

Originally from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Mohn attended Philadelphia’s Temple University where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He currently lives in Brentwood with his wife.

Made in L.A. 2012 is organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART.

The exhibition is presented by

Major support is also provided by the Annenberg Foundation; Fundación Jumex, A.C.; Kayne Foundation—Ric & Suzanne Kayne and Jenni, Maggie & Saree; The Mohn Family Foundation; and the members of the Hammer Circle.

Generous support is provided by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; the Bloom Family; Gail and Stanley Hollander; Dori Peterman Mostov and Charles Mostov; Karyn Kohl; Heidi and Erik Murkoff; Linda and Jerry Janger; Julie and Barry Smooke; Amy Adelson and Dean Valentine; The Fran and Ray Stark Foundation; and an anonymous donor.

Additional support is provided by ForYourArt; the Pasadena Art Alliance; Alumnos 47; and the LA>

The Venice Beach Biennial is made possible by the Teiger Foundation.

KCRW 89.9 FM is the official radio sponsor. Los Angeles magazine is the official print sponsor.

In 2007, the Hammer honored Mike at our annual Gala in the Garden. John Waters, who was a dear friend to Mike, delivered the tribute to him. We asked John if we could reprint his remarkable speech as a remembrance. We will all miss Mike very much.

-Ann Philbin

Hammer Gala | October 14, 2007

John Waters & Mike Kelley, 2007. Photo: Stefanie Keenan.

I live with Mike Kelley. Yes, the man who made pitiful seem sexy, the man who turned grimy thrift shop stuffed animals into heartbreaking, jaw-dropping beauty by placing them on stained blankets on the floor of art museums. The man who may have even inspired a whole new underground sexual fetish—that of the “plushie,” people who are sexually attracted to partners when they dress up as stuffed animals. Yes, I live with the man who much later and with just as much daring created a depraved blue-collar Satanic Dollywood-type theme park movie extravaganza entitled “Day Is Done.” From “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable” and Warhol’s 24-hour movie “Four Stars,” Mike’s “BerlinKelleyplatz” as I call it, was the perfect and logicalcontinuation and fulfillment of this great thrill ride multimedia artistic experience.

Yes, I live with Mike Kelley, the ultimate bad boy who knows sex will always be better if you were raised Catholic because it will always be dirty and funny. A man who gave new meaning to “extracurricular activities” from high school yearbooks. A man who may recognize the gleeful rage I felt when I asked my high school teacher to sign my yearbook in the mid-sixties. The yearbook with not one extracurricular activity listed next to my name. The teacher wrote, “to someone who can but doesn’t.” Mike, a man who doesn’t but can, might find humor in my recent predicament when clergy at my Catholic high school were accused of long ago sexual abuse. When the victims group called me for their support 40 years later I had to give them the good but confusing news that these Christian brothers hadn’t touched me so I couldn’t help their cause. Was I having a recurring memory when I wondered later if I should feel bad because even the child molester teachers had rejected me!

Mike Kelley is a man who recognizes true heroes. He’s a man who knows John Sinclair’s name alone in a painting is the proper canonization of a saint of a different sort. Yes, I live with Mike Kelley, the man who gave repression a good name in many rooms of both my homes.

Even in my Baltimore bedroom. Right across from the bed is a Kelley painting of Satanic-like graffiti with the words “Thay You Love Thatan” scrawled elegantly and scarily. A Satanist with a lisp. Thay it! A Satanist doomed to failure. Thay you love Thatan. I’m a single man who occasionally gets to sleep with new people and I always make my partners say “Thay You Love Thatan,” before hopping in the sack and I thank Mike Kelley for helping me get lucky through artistic humor.

In my New York apartment hangs Mike’s “Dirty Mirror” which is a painting of a mirror with disgusting leftover cocaine type leavings smeared uglily across it. What a terrible night it suggests, reckless misleading moments of chemical joy that seem so sour an hour later. Sort of like the drawing of a Catholic soul we had to study in grade school—all white but dotted with venial sins like measles on a Robert Wyman painting.

But of course mortal sins were worse. The ultimate offense against God when the soul became all black like Mike’s 1995 “Wedged Lump” which hangs in my dining room and suggests a giant turd with comic strip “stink” marks. An art work where if someone comments “kind of shitty” it’s a compliment. Where my dinner guests are forced to confront the fate of their meal no matter how gourmet the initial presentation appeared.

I live with Mike Kelley in my work space, too. Right above my writing desk in New York is one of his “Garbage Drawings” —isolated refuse with everything else but the garbage eliminated from the original Sad Sack cartoons. Fumes of filth that I hope inspire my screenplays and fetid books.

Even my library is defaced by Mike Kelley. Hanging there is one of the hilarious 1989 “Reconstructed History” vandalisms—a real history text book that Mike defaced with glee, the same thing all of us who were bored in high school wanted to do in reaction to teachers who didn’t challenge us or discouraged our rabid interests. Our boredom turned to anger and then to rage and if we were lucky, then to art. “Barf” adds Mike to the patriotic “Signing of the Declaration of Independence” illustration and now, on the 4th of July, I can finally feel patriotic thanks to Mike Kelley’s troublemaking defiant reinvention of this school book.

Even my assistants live with Mike Kelley. In their office hangs the “Auditions” street sign he created for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2004. Mocking the hastily done cardboard signs casting agents put up in the halls of hotels to lead actors to try-out for roles, Mike celebrates the sadness of Hollywood, the despair of a failed career, the missed opportunities and the ever present clicheÅL of the casting couch. “You bought that?” my father asked incredulously when he saw “Child Substitute,” the pitiful collage Mike did that looks like a five-year-old retarded boy began cutting out pictures of animals from Sunday newspaper ads but lost his train of thought and abandoned the project. “Yes,” I told my Dad proudly, “I sure did!” “They saw you coming boy,” he said shaking his head as he focused in on the crudely cut out and lumpily glued-on pets, framed in the cheapest way possible. Here was the perfect bait for those who have contempt before investigation about contemporary art. I love how mad Mike’s work makes some people. Isn’t that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate? The nay-sayers of contemporary art who can’t see Mike’s brilliance here should be outraged because, yes, they secretly know this contemporary art DOES hate them and they deserve it!

Somebody ELSE lives with the one Mike Kelley piece I desperately wanted and missed out on. Entitled “Storehouse,” it may be the most shocking and amazing of all Mike’s sculpture and I blinked and somebody else beat me to it and bought it. It’s nothing but a cat food shipping box filled with soiled, packed-up cat toys, with two unframed found Hallmark-type greeting cards hung above from a vet showing sympathy for the death of your cat. This mundane still life of sadness and private mortification makes me feel like spontaneously combusting every time I see it reproduced and NOW somebody else owns it and I fantasize breaking into the museum or collector’s home and stealing it!

Isn’t Mike really a magician? Isn’t someone who can make you see something supposedly shameful in a beautiful, hilarious, radical, subversive way really a miracle worker? Even a good Catholic? Art + Auction magazine called Mike an “Apocalyptic Vulgarian.” I call him a terrorist and a healer. Thay it! Go ahead. Thay you love Mike Kelly. I thor do!

Reproduced with the permission of John Waters.

Los Angeles—The Hammer Museum presents two free programs as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival:

Maren Hassinger, Flying, 1982. Photo: Adam Avila.

Walking Tall
Thursday, January 26, 7pm
Artists Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, and Ulysses Jenkins continue to investigate Kiss, performed in the 1970s and reimagined in October 2011 to celebrate the opening of the Hammer’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. Special guests, including artists who have worked with the trio since the 1970s, participate in this exciting iteration. Aspiring to accentuate the positivity and joyfulness of life, each guest offers a unique contribution to the performance. A meditation on pride and self-confidence, Walking Tall will culminate in an interactive audience experience.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution, 1979 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Image courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Eleanor Antin’s Before the Revolution
Sunday, January 29, 2pm & 7pm (Matinee and evening performances)
Eleanor Antin’s Before the Revolution, first performed at the Kitchen in New York in 1979, is a key example of the artist’s critical, theatrical practice. The play explores Antin’s imaginary character “Eleanora Antinova,” a black American ballerina trying to make it in the great modernist Russian company of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, where she encounters the histories and ambiguous realities of performance, racial profiling, and the magical promise of modernism and revolution. Performed by actors who manipulate Antin’s original, hand painted, life scale puppets to enact this darkly comic narrative, Before the Revolution is a prime example of the artist’s incorporation of a vaudeville sensibility into performance art, and demonstrates a daring attempt to consider race and gender in relation to artistic mastery. Antin directs the production along with Robert Castro. Before the Revolution is curated by Malik Gaines and Alex Segade and organized by in collaboration with the Hammer Museum as part of the ongoing programmatic collaboration between the two organizations.

ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE AND PUBLIC ART FESTIVAL
The Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival will transform Southern California over eleven days from January 19-29. Featuring more than 30 major performances and large-scale outdoor projects, the festival will include new commissions, reinventions, and restagings inspired by works created by artists during the Pacific Standard Time era. The festival is organized by the Getty Research Institute and LA><ART; support is provided by the Getty Foundation.

Visit http://pacificstandardtimefestival.org for the full festival schedule and ticketing information.

Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

T. Kelly Mason. Nocturne (Pierce Brothers Westwood Village), 2011. 4 Duratrans films. Courtesy of the artist.

Los Angeles–based artist T. Kelly Mason’s diverse practice includes sculpture, performance, sound, video, and works on paper. Since 2007 he has also been working with photographic transparencies mounted in light boxes, drawing on the medium’s elusive material presence as a means to explore representation. For this new work, Mason visited Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park, an intimate, carefully landscaped cemetery nestled amid several high-rise buildings just around the corner from the Hammer Museum. Resting place of the museum’s founder, Armand Hammer, and the film director Billy Wilder, namesake of our theater, the cemetery is also the final home to Hollywood luminaries such as John Cassavetes, Farrah Fawcett, Peggy Lee, and Jack Lemmon. It is a sanctuary filled with both melancholy and humor. A small plaque reading “Marilyn Monroe” is surrounded by lipstick kisses left on the marble by loving fans, while across the park, Rodney Dangerfield’s headstone reads, “There goes the neighborhood . . . ”

Mason’s work touches on the cultural and political significance of aesthetics through a confluence of art historical references and popular culture. After extensively photographing the cemetery, he collaged portions of his images to create composite views in which the grave sites are rearranged to poetic effect, activating a conversation about memory and the meaning of existence. Aligning his interest in the transgressive potential of an aesthetic sublime with his investigations into rituals memorializing the dead, Mason looked to the German romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich as inspiration for the composition of his revised views of the cemetery. A master of the allegorical landscape, Friedrich painted dramatic scenes accentuating both the beauty and the intimidating magnitude of nature. Derived from traditional celluloid animation, Mason’s technique of layering theatrical lighting gels and articulating imagistic details with ink drawing is particularly well suited to rendering deep space and intense color in a manner that is perhaps ironically akin to Friedrich’s method. Marrying a contemporary mode of representation typically used for advertising and animation with the history of painting and photography, Mason offers us a multivalent meditation on themes of celebrity, death, and the search for meaning.

Organized by Corrina Peipon, curatorial associate.

Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery is located one block east and half a block south of the Hammer Museum at 1218 Glendon Avenue.

This interview was conducted by electronic mail. Questions were composed by the Hammer’s new media associate Amanda Law. Look for more information on Patricia Esquivias’s Hammer Project here.
*****

AL: Have you always worked with video? What drew you to the medium?

PE: I started using video in 2005. Previously I had been making works with text but I was always unhappy with the material results of the finished works. I liked what I had to say but I didn’t like how it looked. With video I could say it and it could be brief, and the image became something to play with. In the beginning it was a liberating discovery.

Patricia Esquivias. Still from Of a short stay, 2010, 2011. Two-channel video, color, sound. 10:02 and 1:31 min. Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York.

AL: When and why did you begin with the camera-on-laptop/hands setup?

PE: It all happened at the same time, I wanted to show how things happened, how I was there doing them in that specific moment. The laptop was there because it was what I usually had at hands reach, the only tool I could somehow work with.

AL: How do you prepare for filming these videos? Do you rehearse?

PE: Most often first there are months of thoughts going round in my head with some note-taking, image preparing, reading, walking, then I set up the camera and go. Many times it turns out that I wasn’t ready and I have to wait a while longer for ideas to set properly. Other times I continue going on that first attempt until something I like happens.

Patricia Esquivias. Still from Folklore I, 2006. Single-channel video. 14:43 min. Image courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York.

AL: In many of your videos you navigate between video clips on the laptop to photographs you hold in your hand to handwritten pieces of paper, but why don’t you just show everything on your laptop?

PE: Some things are made for the screen and I don’t want to take them out of it. Other things I need to be able to move around and place next to others to make connections, they need to be free from the screen. It also leaves options for chance and error. It’s also important for me to use the screen as a material, like any other material that a sculptor might use.

AL: I find your work very humorous. How does humor function in your work?

PE: As counterbalance to the pathos. I could say maybe also as a tool for understanding but maybe it is more accurate to say it is a result of understanding.

AL: Am I right to think of YouTube when I watch your videos? (If I discovered these videos there without any previous knowledge of you as an artist I would be convinced that these were created in earnest.)

PE: I would think not, but that is a very difficult question. I never thought that the videos could go on YouTube because it is too big, tough and frightening. I have been very moved by certain things that I have seen on YouTube and always thought that my work didn’t come from the right place to be able to have the effect I wished if placed on YouTube. I always thought that I had to create some sort of safe environment to watch them, something far away from the things that they show.

AL: What kind of “news stories” do you personally find yourself drawn to? (For instance, I am always sucked in by human interest stories, much to my chagrin.)

PE: I think that usually I am interested in finding out how things have ended up being how they are when I encounter them. Generally I am always imagining people to answer my questions but I rarely meet these people.

But rereading the question I see you say “news” and I had read “new”. In news probably like you, human interest, although I’m not sure how many kinds of stories there are, but I don’t see/read much news anyway.

AL: How much time do you spend on your laptop every day?

PE: Most of the day, apart from time for going for walks.

Patricia Esquivias. Still from Reads Like the Paper, Group IV, 2009-10. Single-channel video, color, sound. 17:35 min. Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York.

AL: You have lived in many places in your life. Where do you consider home? How would you describe “home”?

PE: At the moment I am living in Madrid, which is the place where I have spent most of my life, however I don’t particularly consider it home. Here I have a house where I have my belongings and where I feel good, there is something about the house that makes me feel it is home, but it is a kind of island. I guess the two variables that are most important for me in any place are friends/family and a living space in which I feel good.