003

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003
Transcript

CS — Christopher Schreck
KW — Kristen Wentrcek
AZ — Andrew Zebulon

CS
To begin, I thought we could discuss how the exhibition’s setting informed your decisions creatively. So, for those who may not be familiar, can you offer some quick context around the Marciano Foundation’s building and its history?

AZ
The building was built in the early 1960s and was designed by Millard Sheets, who was an architect as well as a painter and a teacher. It was originally designed as a Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, with a huge theater where they would put on their secret rites and a ballroom on the top floor. Then, at some point, it fell into disrepair; I don't know that it was abandoned, but it was empty and derelict for a long time before the Marciano Foundation took it over seven or eight years ago and renovated it.

CS
Your exhibition is staged in the building’s library, which includes shelves of books and several pieces of artwork on display. Your pieces seem to have been installed in ways that respond directly to this environment, encouraging visitors to relax, read, and converse, but I wonder if the designs themselves make any references to the space or to the Freemasons more generally?

KW
Well, we pulled a lot of images of old temples, but that furniture was pretty ornate; there was a lot of turned wood, and the spaces were set up almost like an auditorium. So instead, we wound up focusing more on Masonic symbols—the things that you would find on a freaky little hat that they would have—rather than the actual furniture itself.

AZ
There’s also the coloring of both the pieces and the carpet. The yellowish carpet is a direct reference to the room’s original carpeting, and the coloring of the pieces themselves was meant to work in concert with the building and, in particular, with the mural that Sheets painted in that room. So, there are some elemental references to the building in there, too.

CS
Considering this was a commissioned project, I wonder what kind of parameters you were working within as far as creative license. Were you given free reign or did you work with the foundation to arrive at a mutually agreeable idea?

KW
With projects like this, people will often like something you’ve made in the past, and when they talk to you about a new project, they envision it in that same language. With the Marciano, we tried to shift it a little bit from things we’d done, but in some ways, I think it stayed quite elementally similar to some of our previous work. We were really trying to thread the needle between doing something different while also staying within the language that fulfilled the expectations of the people who asked us to do the project. So, for example, you can interpret “library” in a lot of different ways. When I think about a library, I think, “I’m not speaking to anybody for five hours.” That’s the beauty of a library. But the Marciano was thinking of this library more as a meeting space. They wanted more interactivity. So, I wound up imagining it more as a cruise ship dining room—that’s sort of the “library” I had in my mind.

AZ
Yeah, or a sitting room, a conversation room, which is maybe closer to the original Masonic lounge. But one of the other things that I thought was interesting about the process, which we hadn’t done quite this way before, was that as we were developing the concept and passing drawings back and forth with the Marciano, they talked about how they really wanted the space to feel open. So, as we were making groupings and arrangements of furniture that allowed for a sense of flow, we arrived at this idea of producing an interconnected modular set of furniture that can be rearranged in different ways. There are actually a few pieces in the set, like some of the hexagonal seats, that are really only there as connectors, because we were asking ourselves, “How do we interconnect all of this stuff?” That all came directly out of this back-and-forth.

CS
The inspirations for your collections tend to span across a range of cultural touch points, from film and fine art to broader ideas like surveillance and biomimetics. Kristen, you mentioned cruise ships, which is really interesting; were there any other motifs or reference points at play here beyond Freemasonry and the Marciano building itself?

KW
We looked at Carlo Scarpa, the architect. He used a lot of reliefs and openings, and I think the way we carved these pieces relates to that—like with the sofas, where we’d start with a big block of foam and take out a huge mass to create the form. There are definitely some architectural references happening.

CS
Based on the exhibition text, it sounds like you might have also been thinking about airports and how they function as liminal spaces.

KW
Yeah, we go back to this idea of liminal spaces a lot. I think using installations to create a kind of “portal” in a building is always exciting and challenging. The Marciano’s space is actually so weird, in that the lobby and theater all go together, since they came from the same era, but the library is totally different, almost like an operating room or something. The walls are super white, the floor’s concrete, the lighting is bright—it’s so bizarre. So, for us, it felt like the space was already a kind of “portal” on its own, and we were just adding some texture to that.

CS
To complete these new foam works, you incorporated a pigmented coating sourced from a commercial supplier. Was this intended as a means of fortifying the pieces to make them more durable and functional? Or was it more of an aesthetic decision?

KW
A little of both. In a way, it reflects the finish that we’ve used in the past, since the chemistry is pretty similar, but this is probably an eighth of an inch thick versus a sixteenth, which actually ends up being quite different. It has more of a rubbery feel. I think it’s much better for a high-traffic situation like the installation at the Marciano. The last thing you want is somebody calling you in the middle of the night, saying, “Hey, there’s a huge hole in this.” [laughs]

AZ
To some degree, I think it was kismet. We’d been wanting to try this particular coating for the foam pieces anyway, because we have real limitations as to what we can do ourselves. Spray coating can be really labor-intensive, and there are lots of fumes. It’s kind of a nasty process, and we’d been doing it in our studio space, which is very small. Practically speaking, to have done these large-scale pieces for the Marciano would have been really difficult logistically, not to mention it being hard on our brains and lungs. It would have been crazy, even for us. So we were looking for a way to continue with the foam without doing everything ourselves, and this seemed like a great opportunity to bring everything together.

CS
To that point, the use of this coating was also noteworthy because it required an outside collaborator. My impression of your shared practice up to this point is that nearly everything has been done in-house, hands-on, built from scratch in the studio. So, in outsourcing this part of the fabrication, I wonder what the process looked like: Was it a simple outside service, where you brought in some specs and they executed, or was it more collaborative, where there was a dialogue that led to this finished result?

AZ
It’s collaborative, but not really in a creative sense. What's nice about working with these guys specifically is that they work with other creative people and on creative projects, including a lot of Hollywood stuff, so they’re less rigid than other manufacturers in that sphere might be. If you say, “Hey, we want to do this crazy thing,” their response is, “Okay, cool. Here’s how we could do that.”

KW
So many other manufacturers or fabricators would be like, “Oh, you don't want to do that.” There’s a real hurdle you have to go through, where you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to pay you anyway. Trust me, let’s try this. It could be good for both of us: You’ll have a new technique in your repertoire and we’ll get to do something that’s a little bit more interesting.” But these guys are pretty much game for anything.

AZ
Yeah. They’re open to entertaining what you want to do, but then they can also say, “Well, your idea probably won’t work, but this other idea might,” and it’ll approximate what you’re trying to do. So, there is an element of working together, which I think is cool.

CS
Generally speaking, how would you describe your process for developing new ideas? Over the course of your collaboration, have you arrived at a systematic approach or a set division of labor?

KW
Yeah, we kind of have it nailed down at this point. This project was kind of an exception, because if we’re working with someone else, like the Marciano, then we have to find ways to translate it, whereas if it’s just us, we don’t have to do as much documentation along the way.

AZ
Yeah. This project was a little different from the way we usually work, because we were starting from a place where there was a language and a materiality already established. When it began, we actually tried to go in a different direction, where we proposed this angular, curved, almost Space Age-y stuff, but they were like, “That’s not really what we had in mind.” So then, once we understood that they wanted something like the elemental stuff we’d done before, it was a little easier to generate a bunch of ideas in SketchUp. But usually, as far as drawings, Kristen starts with a ruler, pen, and paper, and I’ll do something much looser, and we’ll start developing the ideas from there.

CS
Speaking of SketchUp, when I first saw the name of the show, I thought of 3D-modeling, where “quaternion” refers to the rotation of an object around an axis. Obviously, it turned out not to be the reference you were making with that particular title, but it did make me wonder if modeling was part of your process.

KW
Totally. 3D-modeling is great for saying, “We want to fit this object in this space. What does it actually look like?” I like to make real models, too, but those sometimes aren’t all that accurate. Andrew’s SketchUp documents allow you to say, “Okay, how many inches do we actually have on this side?” Otherwise, you’d be recalculating it a hundred different times.

AZ
Right. At least for me, SketchUp has become a bigger part of the process over the last couple of years, just as I’ve learned how to use it. The good thing about it is that helps you do things very quickly. So, say we want to make a chair. With modeling, it’s very easy to crank out ten or twenty or fifty different versions of the chair, all at different heights, and you can start to play with that. It’s the same with laying things out in a space and getting a sense of how you might place objects in a room. All of that’s great—but the weird thing is that it also probably boxes in my thinking a little bit as I’m drawing, because it’s regimented in a way that paper is obviously not. It’s strange to think about the impact it must have on what my ideas look like.

KW
Yeah. You kind of box yourself in, but it allows you to whip out twenty versions in an hour, just moving the arm of the chair around, and then you can say, “Okay, I think this one works.” But actually, Andrew, do you feel like you always start with SketchUp? Because typically, I don’t want to talk about a new idea until I’m ready. I’m actually a real bitch about it. [laughs] I’m like, “I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. Just let me come at it from my own point of view.” And then we’ll go to a bar and say, “Okay, this is what we’re thinking,” and usually there’s some overlap there. Then we’ll tweak it into something that makes sense and feels right. But whenever we begin something new, I feel like I’m always starting off with some sort of library of images. What are you starting with?

AZ
I’m starting with shapes—but I think the real starting point might actually be the materials. I feel like you’ll often come with some idea, like, “I think this material or this process is really intriguing. Is there something we could do with that?” That’s what gets the ball rolling, and then you’ll start pulling together those visual references, and I’ll start thinking about the shapes of things or how we might apply this material in some vague way, because we don’t necessarily always know how it’s going to work or if we can even do it ourselves. Sometimes it all works together and sometimes it all falls apart. But broadly speaking, I think the working method we’ve defined over the years is that you start with visual stuff, I start with the same four shapes I’m always drawing, and eventually they come together into something.

KW
It’s true, we always end up repeating ourselves. I have this weird app called Eagle.Cool, which I use to put together visual references. No one else has ever heard of it, but I just think it’s the most genius thing ever. So, I might say, “Andrew, check out these 500 images I pulled for this idea,” but honestly, it’s kind of the same thing for every project. And you’re always saying, “Check out this shape I want to do,” and I'm like, “Yeah, I know. I know what you want to do.” [laughs]

CS
So, we have recurring shapes, but also recurring materials, insofar as you produced these latest works with industrial-grade foam, which is a medium you’ve returned to on several occasions in recent years. I’d be curious to know what appeals to you about foam as a material and the unique opportunities and associations it might bring to your work.

AZ
This is actually a good example of what I was just describing, because I feel like one day, Kristen said, “Remember those karate helmets that were squishy but coated? I think we could do something cool with that.” That led us to explore medical and rehab equipment. At the same time, she was trying to figure out how the helmets were actually made, and after a crazy hunt, she eventually found the right coating that we could apply to the foam. So, we made some weird sculptural pieces with that, and later, when we were asked to make a chair for a group show, we thought, “Oh, maybe we can use the foam.” In retrospect, it was maybe the least practical thing we could have chosen, but it has turned out to be something that people really respond to, maybe more so than any of the other materials we’ve worked with.

KW
That’s true—but our general lack of success is due to the fact that we like to explore new materials, so we never become the master of any of them. I’m just interested in materials in general, so I’m not necessarily trying to do foam always and forever. A lot of artists and designers love to hone in on one thing, and that’s what they do for the rest of their lives. I think we’re quite the opposite of that.

AZ
That would be the smart thing to do. [laughs]

KW
[laughing] Yes, that would be the smart thing, the reasonable thing to do, but we’d rather blow a ton of money on getting new stuff and trying to figure out how to use it. At the same time, working with Marta, we see that there can be something positive about building on the same language, and that has encouraged us to stick with this material and explore the different ways we can use it. For example, the No Life show that we did with Marta in 2023—before that, we had always carved the foam pieces with hand saws, but with that project, we thought, “Why don’t we use the capabilities of our foam guy in the Bronx?” The foam is imported in these huge blocks, maybe 96 x 48 x 40, and then he’ll chop it with a big guillotine, usually in iterations of squares, since he’s mostly making upholstery cushions. But he also has some older tools that he doesn’t use that much. Nobody else cares about any of this stuff—but get a couple of freaks like us in the building, and he was immediately like, “Hey, check this out.” [laughs] Basically, it was like a bandsaw. Bandsaws are often vertical, but this was a horizontal bandsaw. You’d have a jig, and you’d run this bandsaw across the jig.

AZ
If you've seen the pieces from that show, they all have this ribbed cushioning. So, basically, for the jig, we cut a profile template out of Masonite with all the little bumps on it, in actual size. Then he would take that, put it up against a square block of foam, and then run the saw along the template.

KW
Right. So, we were using this familiar material, but because we’d stopped cutting the foam by hand, we were able to get a different effect. That’s really the point: If you stick with a single material for long enough, you can develop it in new and interesting ways.

CS
With these pieces at the Marciano, there’s a trompe l’oeil effect, where they look almost like they’re carved from blocks of concrete. There’s also this striking combination of smooth surfaces and more gnarly textures achieved through manual carving. I really enjoy that balance.

KW
Totally. The spray texture is cool, too, because it’s also done by hand. So, you have the texture of the stuff that we carved, but then, on the flat surfaces, you also have the texture of the sprayer, who pulls the gun back as they’re creating that orange-peel effect. There’s a lot that’s done by hand, so the pieces aren’t really “manufactured,” because you’re never going to get the same thing twice. We couldn’t take it to someone and say, “Hey, replicate this.” It would just be impossible.

CS
That brings up an interesting point: Unlike many of your pieces, which tend to be one-off, this new collection was conceived as a kind of “unique edition,” where the forms can be reproduced, although each individual piece is still unique by virtue of the manual elements of cutting and spraying that you just mentioned. I wonder what it was about this collection that made editioning feel like the right fit, and whether it’s something that you’re hoping to explore further in the future?

AZ
Benjamin [Critton] and Heidi [Korsavong] from Marta have been big believers in all of our insane shit, but especially in these foam pieces. They’ve been very steadfast around the idea that, positioned in the right way and shown to the right people, they could be very successful. So, doing them in editions is … I was going to say a “concession,” but that’s not the right word, because it’s not like we’ve been fighting this idea. I just think working this way will hopefully help them place the pieces. But it was also a practical consideration, because with the earlier foam stuff, we’d been coating all of the pieces ourselves, so just the idea of someone rolling in off the street and saying, “Cool, I’ll take ten of those,” was actually kind of scary. Honestly, I don’t know if we would’ve even been able to do that—whereas now that we’ve partnered with these people spraying, it seems much more viable. The process is different, so the scaleability has changed, even though we would still have that initial contact with the pieces in terms of the cutting and carving.

KW
Right. It still falls into the “strange furniture” category, the “sculptural furniture” category, because you can’t really make them twice. They stay unique—but now you could do ten of them and not be crying yourself to sleep, preparing to do the project. It’s kind of a beautiful middle ground.

CS
As far as negotiating that space between sculpture and furniture, one aspect of the Marciano show that sets it apart from others you've had in recent years is the question of functionality. With an exhibition like Hog Trap (2021), you were making a point of presenting the pieces as wall-hung art objects—but even looking back on earlier collections of furniture, there was often the suggestion of utility, but there would be something about the materials themselves that would likely dissuade people from actually using them. With Quaternion, you’re actively encouraging visitors to engage with the pieces, to use them rather than simply admire them. I know your views on functionality have evolved a bit over the course of your collaboration; I’d be curious to hear where things stand at the moment and whether the functionality of these new works suggests a broader shift in approach.

KW
Honestly, I don’t care too much about the functionality. I like the beginning-to-delivery process, but once we’re finished, it’s like, “Whatever you want to do with it, go for it.” Of course, we have to incorporate some sort of guarantee of use, so that’s part of the R&D [Research & Development], and I think there is a benefit to it being functional. I like that it’s not just a static object. But to me, it’s never been a huge point of focus, and I’m not sure it is now, even though it’s become more possible.

AZ
I would agree. I don’t think this necessarily represents a larger shift; I just think it’s about working with internal and external prompts. With Hog Trap, when we started talking about what we might do for the show, a lot of our thinking was practical: “Okay, the show’s across the country, so what can we do that’s not going to cost ten million dollars?” Actually, our first idea for that show was to make a bunch of Mylar sculptures and inflate them once we got there. We could just bring them all to L.A. in a carry-on. But then Kristen started talking about these homecoming mums, and we decided to explore that idea instead. With the Marciano show, as we were saying, the Foundation had this pretty strong belief in our vision, and in these things that we had done, but they wanted to incorporate that language into their own space to serve a particular function. So, we always find ourselves working with these other mitigating factors.

KW
It’s not necessarily democratic for us—it’s more obsessive and demonic, rather than being like, “I can’t wait for somebody to engage with this.” There are so many other logistical constraints, and none of this happens in a vacuum. I mean, maybe if you’re a billionaire and you don’t care whether you see any sort of ROI [Return on Investment], or if you have a million dollars to ship it across the country, or if you’re able spend 500,000 hours just playing with something for three years, it would be different. But realistically, there’s always a series of constraints that help get you to something, which I quite like.

AZ
Sometimes the constraint is just us saying, “Well, if we're going to spend our time and money doing something, and we probably aren’t going to get a return on investment, then we might as well do whatever we want, and if someone else responds to it, that's cool.”

KW
Yeah. Working between art and design, you have to care a little bit, but we’re not making products, really. You have to make sure you don’t just start a furniture company, where Marta’s just the distributor. That’s not the point, either. But there is a reality to the system that we’re in, where there has to be some success to it. Otherwise, it must end. It’s strange.

CS
So, you’ve completed the new work, the show is up. As you enter the Spring, what are your plans? What are you going to be focusing on?

KW
With regards to Marta, we want to work on some lighting, which we always like to do. It’s interesting: When you make something once, you have one shot to do it right, and so a lot of times, the engineering is sort of botched. So, I think we want to make a similar kind of “unique edition” with the lighting, because you often need a few tries to get it right—nothing artistic, just figuring out where a screw hole is placed, things like that. We’ve also been working with fiberglass. We've done that in-house before, so we have a good understanding of that material, but now we’re having somebody else do it, so they really can set it up and get those finishes really crisp and everything just right, and then make a series of those, too.

AZ
We’ll also be doing more of our one-off releases. We’ve tried to formalize things over the past year, so it’s a little more structured than what we used to do, which was just to put a random mix of things on Instagram. Now, we have a standalone website where people can go see these pieces, and it’s really just a way for us to do whatever we want, unlinked to anything else in particular.

KW
So, for example, I’ve been sitting on this box of coal for, like, three years—

AZ
More like eight years. [laughs]

KW
OK, sorry. Like, thirteen years. But now that we’ve set up this website, I’m chomping at the bit to finish my work today, because I’m like, “I need to go get some materials so I can finally mess with this coal!” [laughs] We have all these little projects, where it’s like, “I have this box of coal. I can’t wait to use it. I don’t want to spend too much, and I’m not trying to pitch this as a big project for anything, because it’s too crazy, but I do have the deep desire to mess with it.” So now we can make these things, put them on the website, and say, “Okay, we made five of these, and that’s it.”

AZ
I think it could also serve as a kind of incubator, where we might do something randomly for these releases and think, “Actually, this is something we could do in a larger scale, or with Marta in a future show.” I think it’s cool to have this setup, where we can say, “I don’t know what this is. I just want to do this weird thing and put it on the internet.”

KW
That’s really the fun part of it. It’s about getting into something new without having to fully commit and say, “This needs to go into a gallery show,” and then prepare it for the next six months. You get to exercise building things or understanding a new material. So, we’ll be using this as our outlet, almost like a lab, for things we might want to do in the future.

—

Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon’s Quaternion is on view through the summer at the Marciano Art Foundation.

Christopher Schreck
is a Chicago-based writer and editor whose work has explored subjects ranging from art and design to wig-making and digital conservation. A former editor at KALEIDOSCOPE, his writing has been featured in publications like Mousse, office, CURA., and Aperture, among others. Christopher also runs the popular blog and Instagram account Art Damaged and serves as co-host of the Abundance Zine podcast.

Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon
are multidisciplinary artists living and working in New York City. Their work is wrought from an embrace of unlikely materials and reimagined craft and manufacturing processes. Wentrcek (b. 1984, El Paso, Texas) and Zebulon (b. 1984, San Diego) are the gallery’s longest-running collaborators. Past exhibitions at, with, and for Marta include In Support of Books (2017), Under/Over(2021), Hog Trap (2021), The North American Pavilion (2023), Make–Do (2023), and No Life (2023). Quaternion is the artists’ first institutional installation, and their third solo presentation in Los Angeles.

The Marciano Art Foundation
is a contemporary art space in the heart of Los Angeles. The Foundation is dedicated to fostering a spirit of collaborative creative freedom by making the unique spaces of our historic building available to artists, arts organizations, and other creative groups to realize innovative projects and public programs on an ongoing basis. With over 1500 works in the Marciano Art Collection, the Foundation continues to support living artists through acquisitions, operating a lending program to museums and institutions worldwide and ensuring free access to the collection through exhibitions.

Motion in Field
is hosted and produced by Christopher Schreck in tandem with and on behalf of Marta Los Angeles. Motion in Field’s theme music comprises portions of Leaving Grass Mountain, composed and performed by Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.