Interview with Kelly Wall

Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lili Peper.

When I first met Kelly Wall, she recounted the experience of visiting Utah for the first time, where, upon seeing the red rocks she thought, “Wow, it’s just like at Disneyland!” Growing up in Los Angeles, Wall, as myself, was surrounded by fabrications of the natural environment reflected back in slickly painted faux rocks and plastic flora and fauna. The irony of being surrounded by nature in Southern California yet having it represented in theatrical, kitschy installations is a quintessentially L.A. experience that articulates the mirage of Hollywood looming over the coastal metropolis.

Wall’s sculptures pay homage to, and often emulate, forms of commodity culture, tourism, and entertainment in order to interrogate their forms and functions. She draws influence from the film and television industry, making work that roots itself partially in facsimile. Her sculptures take up the forms of props, often using the playful language of Hollywood set design to comment on concepts of nostalgia and the zeitgeist of Los Angeles, yet notably, all of the pieces and parts of her sculptures are fabricated by hand. As she recounts, her works are not ready-mades but are as close to the “real” thing as possible, engaging in a challenge of visual play that embraces consumerism while rejecting its means.

On the occasion of the 2025 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, Wall invited me to her studio to discuss her newest sculptural works: a fountain made of coffee mugs, a functioning penny press, and racks of glass postcards depicting Los Angeles vistas. For Wall, the materials she uses are integral to the meaning of her works, and wordplay adds further context. Fade to Black (all works 2025), a black circular fountain topped with black mugs stacked on a central pillar, conjures notions of theme parks or memorials. The mugs themselves are handmade but reference ubiquitous souvenir mugs, their handmade quality probing the materiality of the nondescript objects that circulate in tourism and entertainment eco-nomies. Resting on top of the mug stack, a single white mug reads “Once Upon a Time…,” and as the title suggests, the subsequent mugs all literally fade to black in a gradient. Wall utilizes this wordplay to dually refer to the common opening line of Disney fairytales and the ending of scripts—both references nodding to tropes of storytelling. The phrase might even contain a tinge of pessimism within the context of the recent downturn of the film and TV industry, which supports a huge sector of L.A.’s economic infrastructure.

Installed at the Hammer, the fountain acts as a moody counterpart to Wall’s more optimistic Wistful Thinking, a custom penny press in the style of a wishing well —white text painted on the top reads “Well Wishes.” Fully functional, the work produces a flattened penny once cranked, each inscribed with messages such as “you are here” and “something to hold on to.” The sculpture’s proximity to the fountain invites visitors to toss their penny and make a wish, engaging in an exercise of hopes and dreams in the city of stars.

Kelly Wall, Wistful Thinking (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Photo: Sarah Golonka.

Alongside these two works was Something to Write Home About, a group of postcard racks equipped with dozens of powdered glass postcards, each picturing L.A. skyscapes in dusty blues, pinks, and saturated cerulean. All together they make up a larger view of the quintessentially cinematic L.A. sunsets, a motif of the city that is perpetually trying to be captured and always slightly out of reach. I spoke with Wall in her studio about her works for Made in L.A. 2025, our conversation percolating on Wall’s relationship to language, materiality, and the ways in which nature and the sublime inform her both her practice and our shared sense of existential ennui.

Olivia Gauthier: When did you begin making these works for Made in L.A. specifically?

Kelly Wall: It was in February [2025] when I really started working on the postcard pieces. And that was just doing testing, because it took me like six weeks of doing tests before I got to actually start pieces, you know?

OG: So was the penny press already in production?

KW: No. I worked on the postcards from mid-February until May. And then I went on this road trip, kind of a little research slash one-year engagement road trip with my partner. And we went up north and hit all of the penny presses we could find on the roadside. Because I knew I wanted to hit this roadside aesthetic.

OG: You said something about how you put in extra labor to make your sculptures look like the objects they are meant to represent, but without commercially producing them. You mentioned with the mugs—you could have easily sourced that out.

KW: I always think about using whatever material feels necessary for the idea. And that’s really important to my practice because in sculpture all you have are the materials and the title cards to relay ideas through form. And so materials are a huge part of that content. I don’t want to have to explain all the work; the material and the form [should] be doing that, you know. And so with glass—I’ve been doing glass stuff for a little bit now—I feel like I’m exploring it because it holds a lot of ideas that I’m interested in with my practice: the way that it doesn’t fade over time, this fragility that it has, the way it plays with light and changes throughout different lighting contexts. Light makes it change in [the same way that] perception works…in the way that we see things.

OG: You’ve also talked about the idea of facsimile or the trompe l’oeil effect.

KW: [With] the penny press, I really wanted it to relate back to the movie industry and [that] prop aesthetic. The movie industry in L.A. dying was a big part of it. […] I wanted it to just have that plasticy, fake look. [It’s similar to] how at Disneyland, you see the rock formations and you’re like, “Oh, I know what this is referencing.” But it’s obviously the fake version of that thing.

OG: What you said about rock formations makes me think about nature… I think we both had a similar shared experience of growing up in L.A., so wildfires have already always been around, but they’ve never felt so destructive or so uncontrollable; and how that affects our relationship to the place that we’re in.

KW: These ideas of stories that were told about what we could have in our future, and as capitalism continues on, just realizing that it feels like [there is a] deadline to those things. …Especially with the fires…the last ones that just happened in January broke the barrier and destroyed huge chunks of the city that will permanently change Los Angeles and what it looks like. It’s this disillusionment of what we thought was laying ahead, but then also this idea of nostalgia, how it can be a dangerous thing to look back and think that it’s this better thing in the past and how that’s actually not real.

[I’m] just trying to hold both of those things and understand, while experiencing disillusionment…and sadness about things changing. It can feel desperate to hold onto something, which is where souvenirs play this role of holding onto little memories. The mugs or the key chains or postcards, or whatever, are of a slightly bygone era.

OG: How does nostalgia relate to kitsch? I think that’s a big part of the work. I know Mike Kelley is one of your influences. I’m interested in your relationship to conveying an emotional state or mood in the work.

KW: I love[d] reading “Notes on ‘Camp’” [by Susan Sontag]. It was written in the ’60s, so when it talks about things that are campy, it’s things from that era. But if you’re reading something that’s that old, I’ll often think, “Well is camp the same thing now?”

There’s one section that’s about how [representing] nature is always kitsch or it’s always camp. It’s like fake grass, or a fake Christmas tree or those fake rocks that people hide their keys under…. I don’t know if it relates back to the movie industry and just growing up here and prosthetics forming my first interest in making [things], but [there is this] idea that anything can be anything…. Kitsch and prop are overlapping circles.

OG: When you were making the fountain piece, how were you looping in these references to the movie industry, or even references to language with phrases like “once upon a time,” which brings us to Disney fairytales. You pair that with the title Fade to Black, which along with the form of the fountain nods to remembrance or memorializing something.

KW: It feels like [so many] things are coming to an end right now. And I don’t know if I was just really depressed while working on this whole show, with things happening in our government…AI rapidly increasing, and people just losing jobs. It feels like every industry is hurting.

So [with] that piece, I kind of was using the destruction of the fires, and also the movie industry to talk about, more personally in our area, [these] feelings of the end. The fountain being all black, it could be read as this burnt thing. It could be read as the end of a script, where before it says the end, it says “fade to black.”

OG: Could we talk a little bit more about your relationship to language? On the back of the penny press there’s a wooden bucket that says “tender.” There’s also text inside the bucket — a hand-painted found poem of sorts.

KW: I used to try to avoid language because it felt just inadequate to get ideas across. And that’s why I chose to make art and do sculpture…. Language is interesting because it’s so clunky and the things that I didn’t like about it actually could be [used as] a tool, as a material, and could add nuance or add to this confusion that’s happening.

For the penny press, the title is Wistful Thinking, but the text on the front of it says, “Well Wishes.” I was thinking about this idea of the end without overtly saying “the end.”

[Like] the sunsets being a symbol of the end or “fade to black” being what happens at the end of a movie, “Well Wishes” is how you would sign the end of a card, it’s like a sign off…. The instructions [that are painted on the well] are also kind of a tongue-in-cheek allusion to L.A. I actually had it made with star shapes that had question marks in it, so that when you turn the handle [to make a penny], you have to line up the stars. So [you] turn your hand till the stars align, and then insert one penny. [A]nd then it says, “Keep turning to make a lasting impression.” And it’s like a lasting impression, that idea of, you know, fame or something.

So I think language has been really fun. And you know, a lot of L.A. artists have played with language in the past, like Ed Ruscha. He did a bunch of The End pieces. [A]t one point the fountain was gonna have the word “the end” on a lot of the mugs and I was like, “You know what? I feel like it’s better if it’s just hovering out of sight, but present.”

OG: You mentioned taking road trips for research. Whenever I’m driving up and down the coastline, I get this sensation of being in proximity to the sublime.

KW: I’ve always been really drawn to the coast. I live near the beach and I have for the last like 15 years…. I’ve always been really drawn to driving up PCH with the windows down, especially at night when it feels like you’re on the threshold between totally packed society on one side, and totally vast [nothingness]—almost like a vacuum that’s equal pressure, on the other side of the ocean.

If you just zoomed out and looked at a map, you’d really just be on the threshold of this line between a huge continent and this huge blue [space]. It’s weird to call it nothingness because it’s not; it’s so full also.

OG: There’s these different dichotomies…I definitely think that that comes through in the postcards. We’re always trying to take pictures of the sky to try and capture that feeling. It’s literally impossible. That’s an interesting gesture in the postcards too, since each one can represent the sky on its own, but then altogether they create this larger skyline. That breaking apart and coming together relates to this inability to kind of grasp the expanse of something.

KW: I like the idea of the sublime, like you’re saying. It’s so vast and I feel like that vastness just makes me feel more human and more connected to the cycle of a day. [We] can get so caught up in, like, capitalism and consumerism… [T]hey say, “Go outside and look at a tree and It’ll make you feel better in like 10 minutes”—and it’s so true. I’ve always loved [that] about L.A. It’s a city, but we have so much access to nature. We’re so lucky.

I don’t want to make, like, environmental work or political work, but…I’m making work about my experience and my experience is turning to nature for things…. Political stuff is happening around me…and [when I] bring nature into my work I feel like I’m trying to point to nature as being, like, the external force…and maybe [it has] answers for us.

Kelly Wall, Something to Write Home About #1 – #3 and Wistful Thinking (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Photo: Sarah Golonka.

Olivia Gauthier is a writer and gallery director based in Los Angeles. Her work has previously been published in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. She holds an MA in Art History from CUNY Hunter College.

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