Art in Isolation with Ry Rocklen

In the coming weeks, Carla founder and editor-in-chief Lindsay Preston Zappas will be hosting chats with members of the L.A. art community via Instagram Live on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. 

The following was edited for web from an Instagram Live conversation on April 3, 2020 at 5:30 PST.

Lindsay Preston Zappas: How are you doing? You just had a baby! And a move as well?

Ry Rocklen: We’ve been great—well, Jesus Christ. The baby is amazing. His name is Mika; he was born February 12th. He’s 8 weeks old now, so that’s been a full-time occasion—a lot of diapers, a lot of tummy time, a lot of face to face excitement.

Back in 2016, Carolyn and I bought a house here in Joshua Tree that we decorated with wall-to-wall Trophy Modern furnishings because I had a bunch of the furniture left over from this project I did in Miami with Absolut Vodka and Trophy Modern.

LPZ: What is Trophy Modern furniture? 

RR: Years ago, in 2012, I was working on a piece called Second to None, which was a sculpture made out of all of these found trophies; it was a monument to the lost trophy. In putting together that project, I realized that trophy parts were kind of like a tinkertoy set—you could make anything out of trophy parts. I had this idea that it would be great to make furniture out of trophy parts, and so I made a set of furniture that was in the art fair in L.A. back in 2013, and it just was one of those silly ideas that snowballed into… 

LPZ: —your house? [Laughs]

RR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, into an entire home. [Laughs] Full disclosure: not everything is made out of trophies, but the bulk of the furniture is in fact made from trophy parts—the couch, the coffee table, the dining table, the bar stools, the desk I’m sitting talking to you at now. 

LPZ: Was that a project that you had in mind before you decided to move out there, to furnish a house with all Trophy Modern? Where does art and life merge; where’s the line? When did it stop being a project and start being your life?

RR: And start getting real? [Laughs]

LPZ: Yeah! Tummy time on the Trophy Modern couch.

RR: Initially, it was a matter of me just trying to solve the problem of paying way too much money in storage bills a month to house all this furniture that got shipped back from Miami back in 2015. 

We’d been thinking about getting a place out here; obviously there’s a great history of artists having homes and properties in which they showcase their artworks: Andrea Zittel, she’s a mentor of mine and I’ve always been a big fan of hers, and then Noah Purifoy of course. So we had been thinking about that and a lightbulb went off in my head: I could pay less in mortgage than I am in storage if we bought a house out here. 

Once I figured that out we found a place pretty quickly. We bought this place and I always thought it would be great to come out here, especially after having the baby, and once COVID-19 really began to take hold we came out here to stay for a longer period of time.

LPZ: It’s a pretty big shift to be in Joshua Tree and not in the city. I’m sure it’s really nice to be away and have that time with your family, but also mix Covid-19 in there… what’s the mix of isolation and togetherness that you’re experiencing?

RR: It is really weird. In some ways, it’s a little schizophrenic. It’s great to be able to spend time with our kid, and to just be out here and to be focusing on raising him and making sure he’s growing accordingly, but I feel like it’s this liminal space, or just this in-between space where I don’t know what’s going to happen after this. 

What’s L.A. going to be like? What’s our world going to be like when [we start to take control of this thing]? So for now it’s great, and then going forward we’ll just kind of see what the future holds.

LPZ: What do you think about having a little remove from the community? Is there anything you’ve been doing to try to reach out to connect with L.A. more or are you self isolating even further and taking a break from that kind of art engagement?

RR: I’ve just been reaching out to friends everyday. That’s one thing that I think has been nice, picking up the phone and just giving people a call. I’m part of a group called Artists for Democracy, and we had a meeting via Zoom finally last week and that was nice; it felt really good to be active again with that.

But the art I haven’t been doing as much of just because of the baby, I think. Just before the baby was born, I had a booth with Praz Delavallade at the Felix Art Fair. I was working a ton, making a bunch of new sculptures for that, so I was getting it out of my system almost, this kind of production. It was definitely just part of the scheme of things to not be making a bunch of work. 

But obviously it’s echoing in my mind and I’m thinking about projects. I have some stuff I’m going to work on that’s Food Group related. There’s a bunch of videos that I have from the Food Group project and I’ve been working on a more cohesive video with some of the clips that I have on my computer. That’s something I plan to get to but just haven’t quite yet.

LPZ:  For those who don’t know, [Food Group] is a project that Ry has been working on for a few years at this point. It’s these food costumes that started with the idea—correct me if I’m wrong—of shrinking everyday food objects? Or blowing them up and then seeing if you could shrink them again?

RR: Yeah, exactly. Food Group started with a simple idea of, “what if you made something bigger for it to become small again?” I’ve always been a fan of Claes Oldenburg and I have always also had this question in my own head about, “why would I make something big? Or, exactly how does Claes Oldenburg know when to stop? How big should it really be?” I think he has his own answers and they come through—there’s a monumentality to a bunch of those works, how they almost become buildings in size. 

I remember I met Claes Oldenburg one day at an opening in New York. I saw his retrospective at MoMA at the time, and it’s interesting how early in his career things were kind of to scale, particularly with the soft sculptures. I was asking him what his decision-making was for that increasing in scale. He said, well, just as he gets older the works get bigger.

With Food Group, there was this very clear idea: what if I made something big in order for it to become small again? So this question scale is actually solved by shrinking it back down to scale.

I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it until I realized it would be interesting to rent food costumes—to take this ready-made of the Hollywood prop house food costume and have people go to a 3D scanning facility where they’d be 3D scanned and then 3D printed so that the food that they were wearing would once again resume its original size.

LPZ: We’re all in this isolating time—are you thinking about how that might affect your work going forward? I feel like there’s a sort of communal aspect to that project that is just so contrary to these isolating moments. 

RR:  When it started, there was a very temporal aspect to that project in the sense that it was picking up what was around me; casting my friends and my gallerist in the costumes was a byproduct of taking those that were already close to me and then using them in the work. I wanted there to be a specificity in the people that were in the costumes to offset the generic quality of the food.

I think there is a storytelling that goes on, which has become a big part of Food Group going forward. It can be a medium of storytelling, which is something that I’m interested in working on going forward: the stories of the individuals in the costumes. 

LPZ: I love the idea of the contrast between the generic object and the super personal and [the way that] those two things coincide. It reminds me too of your house right now—you’re living in this Trophy Modern house: these trophies are the most generic, standard thing, but then you’re raising your baby in that space.

RR: Yeah, totally. I didn’t anticipate raising a baby on the Trophy Modern furniture, but that’s where we’re at now, so it’s really exciting. There’s a lot of corners that need to get baby-proofed at some point when he starts walking. 

I often give the example of the pop artists—Andy Warhol’s generation of artists—Andy Warhol pointing to the Coke can and saying, “this Coke can is the same Coke can that you can buy, that everybody can buy—the great commodity of the serialized object or the mass-produced object. 

I think being obviously older than that generation, for me it was always like, “no, this Coke can is different from yours. The print is slightly offset; there’s a dent in the side; I pulled the tab off.” So there’s again that specificity in the serialized object and a kind of celebration in that, to find that difference.That sentiment kind of permeates the practice in different ways throughout the different bodies of work.

LPZ: There’s a notion of shared experience too, being in this social isolation, in stay-at-home, where it’s very personal—we’re all experiencing very different things, I’m sure, but at the same time it’s super universal, everyone is going through the same thing right now.

RR: Yeah it’s true, it’s true. I was so excited to watch Tiger King on Netflix and then I realized how we’re all having the exact experience of enjoying this incredible program on our favorite streaming thing. 

That’s always been something I’ve been struck by—feeling alone in my experience, and then once you start to reach out you realize that everyone’s kind of feeling the same way as you. I think that’s a classic aspect of the human condition. With COVID-19, really our experiences are very similar at home—God willing—a lot of ordering things online, watching similar programming, passing the time.

LPZ: I think about children that way too. I don’t have any kids, but I often think that having a baby is something that’s so universal but so personal and specific. It’s crazy to just be with your little baby during this time and have this life-form that doesn’t know what’s going on in the larger world. 

RR: Yeah, one thing that has been really interesting is the different baby products that I’ve seen throughout the ages—the mobiles that spin, the brightly-colored rattles, the bell—I’ve realized how effective those are to children now that I’ve had a kid. 

Carolyn painted these beautiful India ink black-and-white pattern drawings. There’s one with lines, one with squiggles, one with these different things that look like sperm, one with these bean shapes, kind of 80s patterns. And he just loves those so dearly, and we’ll flip through them and I can tell he has favorites already, different patterns are emerging as his preference.

To me, that was a kind of Eureka moment for how to produce art going forward. I feel like there is something kind of amazing that I can see that’s almost ancestral knowledge, or just very deeply ingrained preference—things that we enjoy seeing are so deeply ingrained. I feel like I’m able to see the roots of it through his eyes. I’m excited to take what I have learned from Mika and the way he sees the world and bring that again into my work.

LPZ: Is there anything else you wanted to brush on as far as the art community and this time? What do we need? What does the art world need? What do we want to see? What does our community need? How do we pull together?

RR: I tuned in a little bit to Julia Haft-Candell’s talk with you on Wednesday and she was talking about how she would have regular studio visits and how she was doing studio visits over Zoom. For me, that was an important thing I wasn’t doing enough of, and I think going forward it’s something I want to do more of. 

Also the art world going through these cycles of “bubble” and retraction,  Being in the art world in 2006, or 2007, or 8, I felt like it was in some ways a little more isolationist in the sense that everyone was so busy all the time. There was less time and desire for collegial communication. I just felt like there was a lot more concern about the market, getting that studio visit at the art fair or something. 

Going forward after this, I think it’ll be an even different landscape to some degree. I don’t know how different, but some of those trends I think will be even more important; the idea of finding your own space to do shows—self initiate shows, making work not necessarily with some high-profile exhibition in mind but because you really want to and can’t not. In terms of community it’s only going to be more important and it’s going to be something that I’m going to be looking for in my life.

LPZ: I think a lot of people are realizing [that they] have the tools to promote [themselves] and reach out to people and be [their] own advocate. I’m interested to see how some of those things might sustain a bit more and how we can do that for each other without some of those structures we’ve come to rely on—or work with them, but also aside them; reinvent new ones. It’s a weird time, I don’t know.

RR:  Thanks for doing this—the live thing. I mean who knew? It’s my first Instagram live appearance—so exciting and new. It’s true I think, using these tools in new ways is going to be exciting for us all.

I mean, it’s freaky in some ways: I was thinking how certain media, like video, now there’s so much devotion to video just in my life—how much video I consume on the daily stuck inside. I feel like in some ways it’s kind of scary but it seems like things are pointed towards people staying inside more as time goes on unless somehow things are turned around. 

LPZ: I was talking to someone the other day about wanting a sort of physicality after all of this too. I feel like video probably will have more of a moment, but at the same time, we’re going to all want to get our hands dirty and see some physical stuff and be really close to things because so much of our daily life right now is this super digitized experience. 

RR: That’s a really good point. I’m sure you’re right. We’re all clamoring to just go to a museum again, go outside on the street. So yeah, you’re totally right. What an interesting moment to be in for us all.

LPZ: I know. And your baby! These are his first moments— that’s a crazy origin story.

RR: Yeah, we’ll have a story to tell him for sure.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 20.

Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder of Carla. She is an arts correspondent for KCRW. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), OCHI (Los Angeles), and City Limits (Oakland).

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