want to do more animation. It’s pretty brutal. When I first met you we had this conversation about having a level of anonymity with ones work. How do you feel about attaching yourself to your work? Do you feel any pressure to be present as the person you are when you’re putting out your work? Yeah it is pretty bizarre. I definitely try to keep physical distance. Even though I’m available through Facebook or something, I’m not actually active on Facebook. I don’t talk on there and I don’t post things basically. With Instagram, it never really was that much about me. Now it’s still not, but I’m more aware of it. I rarely have photos of myself. I rarely even have photos of my friends or of my work. But I try and make it fun for me still. So it’s a source to see something about my life, but it’s still not me. It’s still not the inner life. You don’t really know what I’m doing based on it, which I think is great. I like keeping it that way. Same with my tumblr, all of these things are more just mental archives, not as much “Me, my life, my personality.” My twitter is maybe my most revealing, haha. But even then, it doesn’t give you that much. Earlier you were talking about using the internet as a tool to connect with people a lot more. Was there a point when that ended or something switched? I think I stopped using those things as a community tool
and just started using them as an archiving tool. That’s the big difference. Flickr and Tumblr, early on, were so much about finding people and sharing things and using it as this way to connect with people. Now I guess I don’t want to connect. Or I do, but it’s too much. Fairs are the only place where I’m like really accessible as a human. It’s cool, but it’s so overwhelming. That’s as much as I can handle. It’s so crazy. It’s cool because I think it is important. Even at the (New York) Art Book Fair, whenever I would leave the table, people would come up, but they wouldn’t buy things cause I wasn’t there. But they knew I was there. So there’s that funny difference of; people want to see you and they want to experience even a second of who you are and that’s valuable in some way. That is really interesting. I wonder what they get from it. I mean I like that too. I want to see people who make things. Even with moving to New York—being online was my only connection to art world stuff back then since I was in the middle of nowhere. But then getting here and having people I was already following on Instagram or was friends with on Facebook and meeting them in person and being like “Oh, here they are.” totally changes so much. It even changes your idea about what is accessible and what’s not. You understand that those people are just around, and they’re just people. It kind of brings the world down to this level on which you can access it. It maybe makes things more optimistic. I don’t know.
“It’s a source to see something about my life, but it’s still not me. It’s still not the inner life. You don’t really know what I’m doing based on it, which I think is great. I like keeping it that way.”
FORGEARTMAG.COM 115