I grew up in Los Angeles. I watched lots of television; I still watch lots of television.
There's an uncanniness to living in Los Angeles, from the way you move through the city to the moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you've been somewhere or you know something when you really don't.
I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss video artist I learned about pretty early on. She's one of the first contemporary artists I knew about and was really drawn to.
I think I do more fiction than autobiography.
I just have a deadpan sense of humor, I guess.
I think of entrepreneurship as a way of creating value.
When I'm working on something, even when I don't know exactly where it's going, I have a sense of what I'd like to make. So maybe doing things right is following that sense even when I stop trusting myself. The rightness is in the process, even if it doesn't match up with my plans.
I'm interested in the economy of words and forms: jokes, aphorisms, copywriting, advertising, that way of writing when meaning has to be squeezed into as few words as possible.
I had a studio visitor ask me when a piece was complete, and afterward, I realized I was kind of annoyed by the question. I wrote down to myself, 'Nothing's ever finished' as an operating value.
I never understood why anyone cared about the Kardashians until a friend, who's Latina, told me that she liked them because they're a family who look like hers. I was able to appreciate them differently.
Pop culture or advertising doesn't work perfectly. No one is watching and mindlessly accepting every part of the narrative or ideology.
There's a certain amount of absurdity to the idea that having extremely crisp clothes is what's going to get you through the door. And there's a certain sad reality to it, too.
Representation is a sort of surveillance.
I played sports growing up, and I worked out a lot. Then, when I moved back to L.A., I just fell off everything.
There's no reason to be ashamed of feeling good.
It's very comforting to feel myself getting stronger.
If some things don't make me feel good, I stop them. How simple, yet so hard to do.
My mum was very interested in art and liked to write, and my dad was a hobbyist photographer.
I have said it before and I will continue to say that I don't think art is the most effective form of protest. I don't think it changes policy; I think it changes discourse, and discourse can change ideas, and for me, that's what it's about: having that space for conversation.
