Interview between Cody Trepde and Sarah Seager

 Cody: I wanted to start by talking about Conceptualism and how you see that in your own practice, both historically and in the present. 

Sarah: I think that I’ve always been reluctant to say that I’m part of any kind of discourse. There are things that I love within Conceptualism which has really altered the way that I make work. But, I think, for me, I never particularly belonged so much within Conceptualism because I’m much more of an organic thinker. I’m always confused by what I’m doing and I always think Conceptual artists have a very focused understanding and directed practice. Which is why maybe I fall on the edges of that and I think where I play with Conceptualism is with language and the use of language, but again, the way that I use language is more from my unconscious. Language creates all sorts of personal associations as well as cultural associations and so on, which circle back again to the personal reading. How a word sounds, how it feels, has very much to do with personal associations with that word and my life, or anyone’s for that matter..  The unconscious associations and wordplay that exists within my work,  within images and objects come from a place which is not known readily within me.  I intentionally allow for room not to know what’s going to happen in the work.  That, I think, is what is most important for me. If I am allowed to enter the work through a means that is not entirely transparent, and I must stumble through it, and come to some place where I hope it has enough going on, both with what it might say and what I see before me, and also the possibilities of what might potentially be said, or seen, I feel I am really working. I do love room for multiple readings that are also very specifically contained, meaning that I’ve figured out all the ways my work could be seen, and also all the ways I can’t ever anticipate, and if I feel there is enough room for all without chaos, I am happy. 

It may seem controlling, but it’s not actually, because if I can distill down what messages I can control, I can get closer to a reception which resonates within a narrower sphere, but conversely also always allows for what I couldn’t possibly imagine, giving away to the openess and excitement of interaction with an audience which is a mystery, and has an imagination and history which is magnificently obscured from my practice. So I think that’s that part of the practice, where I really love the process of what, I in my own way, understand what I conceive as, Conceptualism, or where I think that I understand, maybe what that is. I think that is what is so beautiful about art, that, no matter what lens one looks though, art comes through a person who has so many personal and professional layers of experience, that work can’t really be ever, hopefully stuck or encapsulated into a definitive movement or meaning.

Cody: Sure, well you’ve definitely been labeled a Conceptualist with a capitol C, right?

Sarah: Yes and no, and we can talk about that later.. But Cody, where or how did you ending up intersecting with Conceptualism within your work? 

Cody: It’s funny to think about where that label comes from with your work. Is that a critical or populist response, or is it something organic in the work? It’s great to hear you talk about your work as something more organic and it was definitely a part of thinking about the work in the show and certainly something that I’m really excited about in your work in particular. Is there a way to loosen the old definition of Conceptualism? We’ve sort of played out the systems based language pieces in the work of Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner.

Sarah: Yeah, I was definitely very influenced by those artists.I never felt mistaken though, I knew that what I was doing was more populist. I thought, yes, these artists are really interesting, but I felt more of a personal psychological link to it, which I guess goes back to a personal translation of something, bringing experience back to what it is that one identifies with, both in concert with ideas of artistic history and practice.  That early conceptual work rang like a bell yes, I knew what they were talking about in art and life, but it was more about that which for me was missing within my life within the very narrow scope of my family life. Which brings me to the question to you Cody, how did familial or suburban life influence your direction? 

Cody: Where does the notion of Conceptualism come from within your work? Was it something that was happening in your studio and you were responding to that impulse -- something that we might label as Conceptualism, or did you find that you were working from or against a history?

Sarah: Well it was really accidental the way I fell into Conceptual work.  How I had been working before was called minimalist or...maximal minimalist (by a good friend). I was doing very reductive sculptures on the face of things, it looked very minimalist, but how that came about was again from a different place. The work I’m referring to were the bedrail sculptures. Which were actually made from the old tossed out twin bed frames stored in the family basement. I looked at them in both a very emotional way but also with a distance, wanting to transform them into something else. However, I knew that in order to transform these familiar objects I would need help, so I decided to search out welders who could help me. I was involved with doing collaborative works with car welders. I specifically wanted to work with someone out side the art practice, and include them in the work.  So that I would come to a welder with an idea and I would ask them, “What would you do in this piece? Do you think we should put it here? Do you think we should put it there?” At the time I didn’t realize what I was doing, that I really enjoyed working with someone who didn’t have the artistic lens into the work and then try to direct it. I really wanted to lose control just a little bit.

 Cody, you work with images which you find based on specific ideas you are working through, can you talk about that process? I am interested in how an idea, which might at the outset, be extremely personal, be part of a process which is different. I am specifically referring to the new work with the ellipse. Can you talk about the way in which that work came about? About the ellipse?

But after doing that work, I did Excuse my dust which was the very first Conceptual work that I did. And that came completely serendipitously because my Mother actually received a box full of letters that were written by the man that built the house that my family now lives in. This man was the very first librarian at the Huntington Library. He died long ago and my parents moved into his house and we grew up in it. Then years later a woman in Santa Cruz found these letters, in a basement of a house her husband was working on, she found copies of letters authored by the librarian of the Huntington Library,  the return address typed on the top of the letter, so she decided to send them to that address and see if any relatives still lived there. So my mother called me one day and said you have to look at these things, it’s really amazing. And when I saw the box of letters, I thought yes, this is a great opportunity. So I actually went down to the Huntington Library trying to be the good custodian of these letters and offered the letters to them.  He, the author of the letter, his name was George Watson Cole, the librarian, and he was responsible tor creating the literary archives at the Huntington Library, which is also very conceptual. For example, he invented a specific ruler, to measure books, he also was an expert on Shakespeare, and was responsible for most of their collection of his early works. He wrote a wonderful essay on the limits of understanding an author, such as Shakespeare's work, because there are so many versions of his work out there, some perhaps authored by someone else, or in another case, when printing his works they used metal type which may or may not fit on a line of a page, so words, have been altered, sentences changed,so that it could be printed to fit on a page, altered because of the limits of space. 

So I went to the archives at the Huntington Library and saw the book archives. He was a big Shakespearean collector,as I’ve said, and I went and asked would they accept these letters mostly authored by Cole and they said “Oh of course, we’ve got tons of these letters. Just hand them over.” I  thought, Eh, No, I don’t think I want to do the right thing with these letters, I think I want to do the wrong thing with these letters. And so I walked around and I discovered that the Archives of American Art had a building on grounds of the Huntington Library. So I walked in and I asked, “What do you guys do?” and they said, “Well, we collect artist’s letters. We collect anyone from the west coast who’s a significant artist and we collect their letters and we have them out there for art historians to look at and try to understand why an artists may have made the work they that they did based on very personal correspondence between family members, aunts, uncles. Maybe an art historian would glean the real kernel of the idea. I met the head of the archives, and through our discussions, and he was really the one that led me to it,  he was the one that said, “This is really a great conceptual piece.” So I asked him if he would accept the letters within the archives,  the archives’ context being artist letters.  I was asking him to accept an archivist’s letters into the context of artist’s letters, as an artwork by me. It just sort of happened organically through the process of seeing that there was an opportunity to do something interesting.  I was aware of the institutional critique that was going on. I guess I’d always felt a personal need to go within an institution and kind of tweak it a little bit. I did that and met with the head of the archives, and he happened to be someone who said, “Look, my job is to create history. I’m constructing history everyday by what I include and what I don’t include. And as a matter of fact, it can be very kind of arbitrary, because I may have had a bad day on the way to work, and I may have been given these letters and I’ll decide not going to take this, and think, this isn’t really significant. I was interested in the system of inclusion and value and the notion of history and who’s a significant artist. I was a young artists coming up and I thought god it’d be really great to put these letters in and sort of really fuck with their system a little bit. So within the Archives of Art, you’d find an archivist letter, and I was thinking, is there any difference between what an archivist does and what an artist does? Isn’t there the same kind of thinking, the same kind of way that Cole constructed the Huntington’s collection and all of the things that he did? I was interested in the fact that language, they were all hand written letters, and that form of correspondence is really disappearing. People are not writing letters in long hand any more and it just seemed like it was a wonderful kind of opportunity. I started corresponding with the archives, wrote back and forth, and I documented, through my own writing with them, how they determine when something has value or when something has historical merit. I came upon it really accidentally, it wasn’t like I thought, Oh I want to do a conceptual piece, it just sort of landed in my lap. 

Cody: That’s amazing. That’s something that I’ve really been drawn to with all of your work. There’s a pull between a really strong pathos and a cooler conceptual element. I think that in some ways, one undoes the other, except that it doesn’t with your work. It all still moves forward in unison. There’s such a strong pathos in the content of the letters, and then the way that you’ve visually organized and displayed them in sort of a loose grid -- something between a grid and salon style. In the installations, some might be as high as 9 feet, right?

Sarah: Well, I am very interested in your ideas of pathos, and how that is informed by reading books, living life ...or ? My question I suppose is what is your relationship to pathos? How does it figure in your work, and where the Genesis of this idea came from. Was it just a personal moment when you realized the significance of pathos in art? 

I used an arbitrary system for that. I drew numbers out of a hat and hung it accordingly, whether it was 7 inches from the ground or 28 inches from the ground, that was completely arbitrary, the way that was hung.

Cody: And the critics labeled that work as Conceptualism? 

Sarah: Yes, and I guess it is and was, and I thoroughly adored making that piece. It was an incredible piece because I felt like I was playing hooky. I really wanted to get out of my studio and making things. Having conversations with the director [of the Archives] and thinking about it took about a year and half. As I said to a friend, it was like watering the plant and it just grows. Really, it just had it’s own life and I just followed it through. It was an incredible journey.

Cody: Speaking of growing things, could you talk a little about the process for Angus, Autumn, Bird, Black? This sculpture is from 2010 and Excuse my dust is from 1991?

Sarah: Right, yes.

Cody: Could you talk a little about the title and also the process for creating the work?

Sarah: One of the things that is important to know about me is that I’m dyslexic and that’s why the language and trying to sort of become engaged with language was always important to me. It always seemed very arbitrary the way that letters were placed together to form words because when you’re dyslexic it doesn’t matter whether it’s t-h-e or e-t-h, you know it’s “The.” So it’s abstract as a form and from the get go. Then you have to sort of trust that it has meaning in a certain way. I think that informs the way that I also make work. That it comes out of a confusion, but working towards clarity and removing and removing and removing until I finally try to get to the essence of the thing that I’m trying to say. Sometimes it’s a more complicated process and other times it happens almost mysteriously. Like this piece just sort of occurred and I think that there’s a place for that, but you know it told me what it needed to be. I can’t say that I asserted my will over it in any way, it just became, and that’s very strange to say, but that’s how it happened. It went through different stages of becoming, and you know, I had lots of different associations and ideas. There were a lot of associations that came up and again, they're sort of unconscious associations with the form, the shape. Words come up, then I play with that. I realized that it’s clutter. I try to remove. I had to build it up to a place with a lot of possibilities before I could start removing things. 

Cody: The materials for this all came from your home, right?

Sarah: And again, it seems that a lot of my work comes from things out of my home, or my family basement or something like that. So these were actually branches that were cut off of the oak trees that hang over the roof of my house. We cut them down one day and had them in the yard and we had to use ropes to pull them off the roof and land down.They were there in the grass and it was like, wow this is really kind of interesting. So we played around with the forms and then lived with them for a while.

Cody: And the bowls were made there, too?

Sarah: Yeah, the bowls... when it finally got to that moment when it had to be bowls filled with water, we definitely... they were made out of sand and rocks from the property, there at my house. We built up rocks and we put bricks and sand over it and I enlisted my loved ones and family and they all got together and we piled on the concrete in the middle of the night and did it in a couple of hours. We had never done that before, just kind of looking on the Internet, thinking, okay, this could work.

Cody: I first saw this piece in your front yard, and the scale of it is kind of magical, because it felt almost like it dwarfed the size of the yard and then in the installation at LACE, it’s the perfect size. It’s almost as if it’s always the perfect size.

Sarah: That’s the strange thing about it.

Cody: There’s a quality with this work that is in a lot of your other works where there’s a curious fragility. The work is very precarious. It looks like it might fall over, but it’s actually very sturdy. That’s another tension in your work that I find really exciting. It maybe mirrors this idea of Conceptualism and a more organic way of working in that these poles are constantly pulling at each other. Where did the title for the work come from?

Sarah: Just doing word searches.

Cody: Really? Because the words in the title start “A,” “A,” “B,” “B.” Is there any significance there?

Sarah: I actually got it off of a list that some young students were asking for things with birds and things that had to do with nature. Some woman had put together an alphabetical list of everything that she could think of. I went through it and kind of pulled, read it all, and saw those words and they sort of stood out and I thought that’s it. A lot of times the titles come randomly. Like Excuse my dust, those are the letters from the archive, I was driving in my car, it was a hot day, and I was turning on NPR and they were talking about Dorothy Parker and that that was on her grave stone. And, so the story about her life kind of moved me and I though, yeah, that has to be the title of the work.

Cody: So there’s a moment where it just sort of cements itself?

Sarah: Well how does it work for you?

Sarah: It does and I like to kind of get it out of my own head, out to the world where someone else hasn’t said it or put it out there. I like doing that. After Excuse my dust, I had in the studio, the tacks that were all the hanging points of all the letters. There were 88 letters, and I lived with them and then when they finally went off to the Archives of American Art, because they ended up taking it, well that was part of the piece, [the tacks left behind]. I made my own archive, which was the push pins. That became a piece, it was a spaghetti jar, all the push pins, and then the labels labeling “eight and a half by eleven”, “five pages”. But the title for that piece came from an Irish Newspaper that I’d been reading. So I read a lot and I think that that’s part of why language keeps on coming into my work.

Cody: That also relates to the Austerlitz piece. The full text on the checklist is “Austerlitz, 2002,

Sebold, W.G., "Austerlitz", Anthea Bell (translator), Published by Random House U.S.A., Oct. 2001,  ISBN-385504834, Silk screen and ink on paper.” I like the subtle nod to literature, but it feels really important to the work because of how abstracted from the original context the language is in the prints and drawings. What is your relationship to literature and how does that impact your practice?

Sarah: Basically, I’m really inspired by writers. I love art and I look at art, but I can’t look at it too much. I just really love books. It seems that when I’m reading, and maybe it’s because I’m dyslexic, but I really prize reading now, where I’ve struggled with it so much as a kid, that I’m sure you all do it too. When you’re reading, you’re thinking about what you’re reading, you’re making associations with what’s going on in the book. There are all these levels that happen within the brain when you’re reading, you’re identifying with this or identifying with something similar may have happened to you, so that these layers of things that happen within a book, and it’s strange, it sort of becomes a part of your own thinking. Often, when I’m watering plants, I’m thinking in the voice of an author as I’m watering the plants. I am really influenced by it [writers], and particularly what they’re trying to do. Sebald, in a way, could be considered a Conceptualist. What he was doing in the book was mixing fiction and non-fiction so that he would be writing about Nabokov, a fictional character Austerlitz, who really speaks for the author himself, and his search for identity, and [his own] history. I think these are things that reoccur within my own work, things that I’m really interested in. But, that he [Sebald] will tell you a story about Nabokov, and show a [real] photograph of Nabokov catching his butterflies. But it’s a fictional encounter between this fictional character and a real character. Then he’ll be talking about the name of a church and he’ll show these architectural diagrams, but it’s within the context of this fictional character, and work, and time. I think he really pushed the form of fiction where no one else was really doing it. At the time, I think they were talking about memoirs and what’s really a memoir and how much of it was really truth, because that’s the kind of automatic flawed nature of one’s own memory, that you remember it one way, but then over time, maybe other things fill in and then the memory isn’t so pure.

Cody: It’s reinvented.

Sarah: But, wait, what is your relationship to memory? I love that in your work, the sense that part of what you are talking about is perhaps something beautiful that is fictional, like a  wish, or a reconstructed memory, or a memory forgotten, but now treasured...but  then you create something quite different out of that. I’ve talked with you about the supernatural. Do you care to talk about any of this?

Sarah: Right, it’s reinvented. I find that beautiful. I find that fantastic. I love the idea of different kinds of realities. The reality of, let’s say a dream, that when you dream something, you still experience it. It’s still part of you’re waking life. You think about it, you feel as though you’ve lived  it, and in fact you did in some other way, then you’re back in reality and you’re doing something in the real world but you’re influenced by the dream that you had, and then you may also be thinking of a memory, so all of these things converge together and form something that’s quite complex and interesting.  So that’s why I think Seabld really hit me hard. He’s a fantastic writer.

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Sarah: We have both spoken about how writers have influenced both our work, and you and I have on occasion talked about Borges. And I have now become a huge fan of his work because of how you have talked to me about his work. Can you talk about your interest with Borges? 

Cody: Including all of the bibliographic information in the title is one way to deal with that influence, but visually you don’t see it at all. They’re just severed sentence. Why those passages? Are these the sections that you underlined when reading the text?

Sarah: I think it goes back to your idea of pathos, and I’ve never thought of my work that way but it’s really true. It comes from a very baroque place within myself of all of these thoughts. So when reading a book, there are passages that become very personal, or speak to a very personal experience or thought or idea that I have, and there is a mirror within this author’s work, so these things have very specific relationships to things that I’ve thought or experienced. That’s why those things are pulled out of that text [Austerlitz].

Cody: So it operates in the same way that selecting the words for Angus, Autumn, Bird, Black did? These words resonated at a certain level and that’s how the decision was made?

Sarah: Yes, and to hopefully have it be open enough, room enough to elicit some ideas or connections on the viewer’s end that aren’t necessarily all my controlling of the reading of it. But to allow these passages to sit.

Sarah: Can we talk about your work which deals with the theory probability?Who was the scientist who created the machine that figured in your work, and do you have a history of education in science, and how does science play a role in your work? 

Cody: I’d like to talk about the recurring theme of the record player in your work. It appears in Record of 100,000 Sighs and in Austerlitz, but does it appear anywhere else?

Sarah: I don’t think that it does, but circularity was really the idea. This groove in this material, and this sound that comes out of it, and the thing spirals in and then you can go and do it [play a record] again and again. The repetitive aspect of that. Something that goes back to Sebald and nature, the idea of time. How is that structured? I think of it as thought, this internal spiraling of thoughts.

Cody: One of my favorite parts in the On The Line exhibition, is where you can stand in one place in the gallery, looking at Angus, Autumn, Bird, Black, and see the reflection in the large bowl of the two repeating silkscreens of the woman and the record player from Austerlitz. I think it also plays out between the two works even thought they were made 8 years apart. It’s nice to see the themes coming back.

Sarah: I like that they can dialoge with one another. When I first thought of these two pieces together, I saw they really compliment each other and allow each other to speak in different ways. It’s very exciting for me to see them together.

Cody: Could you talk a little about Record of a 100,000 Sighs? It’s one of my favorite pieces of yours.

Sarah: Record of a 100,000 Sighs is a piece where I recorded my own sigh on to white vinyl LPs. Remember those old LPs? I had 100 records, so there were 10 stacks of 10 [records], white vinyl with no labels, and they had felt in between them in a white vitrine hanging low on the walll, with a large Plexiglas case, because I wanted the sense of air, and the idea of sound within an object. You couldn’t hear the sound, but knowing that sound exists within that object, how would that change your relationship to looking at that object? They [the records] became really naked. These vinyl records, even seeing the groove in there, was pretty delicate. It was this really delicate thing that happened with these records. They had this almost prism color that came through them that was really strange. It also was just funny because I had been part of the punk scene growing up and was part of an experimental band called The Monique Experience. We sang in French and we didn’t even know how to speak French but we just sort of made it up and dressed in funny 13th century costumes and we were called “the ever inert Monique Experience” because we did not move, we just stood there.

Cody: How conceptual!

Sarah: Yeah, I know.

Cody: I’m glad you brought that up because it’s one of the questions that I’ve always wanted to ask you. Music seems like a really big part of your life: there’s the recurring image of the record player, there’s something lyrical in the language that you use, and Tal and I have also been fortunate enough to have been over to your place for wine and there’s always really great music playing. It seems like a really big part of your life. I’m wondering how that plays into the work, if at all.

Sarah: It’s interesting. My great uncle was a famous jazz coronetist. His name was Bix Biederbeck. He died of alcoholism and his parents never recognized his art. Every time he made an album, they would lock it in the closet, never play it, and when he went home to visit, he would say “Mom, Dad, Will you listen to what I’m doing?” They would never listen. It was a very strident Germanic background and they never would accept him as an artist, and it really broke his heart. I think that oral history within our family, music has always been a very important part. We would listen to Bix Biederbeck’s records, always talking about music, and then realizing that we weren’t gifted with the music thing. Doing punk music at the time was really fun, it was really playful, because we knew we didn’t really have to know how to play our instruments very well, and we didn’t have to sing that well. Just to get up and do it was really incredible. That was the first time that I really experienced that idea of performance. When you perform- its done. And there's this rush and this thrill. In the studio it’s this protracted thing that goes on and on for months and months and then no one goes “Yea!” I think that music was really very much part of our family culture, then growing up in Los Angeles and deciding to experiment with it myself. I was part of Los Angeles Free Music Society and worked with a lot of really interesting musicians: Thomas Recchion, Fred Neilson, and people that went on to other things but have maintained their practice .They [Tom Recchion and others] went to CalArts and their idea was that they just worked with sound, that was their medium. They went about it as art, but it was sound. I was very influenced by those people kind of coming up. My sister was a manger of an early punk band called the B People, and she also was a photographer at the LA Weekly, she photographed all of this stuff, like the punk band, The Urinals, during the day. I was in high school, we would sneak out of the house, we had a Fiat at the time. We’d roll it down the driveway and the minute we got down the driveway we start the ignition and off we’d go. Music was always there.

Cody: Are you in a secret punk band now?

Sarah: I wish! The last thing I did was with Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber, Jamie Bair, we did something, I think it was called The Very Best of The Perfect Me, or something like that. We just worked with tape loops and things, but that was a long time ago, probably like 10 years ago. So I’m not making music anymore.

Cody: A lot of what you just talked about is very specific to Los Angeles. A big part of the On The Line show was about looking at artist’s practices that could only happen in LA. In a way, you, Meg Cranston, Larry Johnson and Mitchell Syrop, among other artists here in LA, were all making work at the same time that the Pictures Generation was happening in New York. It feels like a very different solution to a similar problem. I know you spent some time in New York and Europe, so how much of Los Angeles is part of your identity as an artist? Do you think about it that way?

Sarah: Yeah completely. Which is really strange because growing up, my Dad was a traveling salesman and we moved from city to city to city. So I’ve lived in New York, Texas, Florida, but coming to LA, it was sort of like I’d found my home. I really am identified with Los Angeles, and I really love the way that artists here have the freedom to kind of mess with and tweak forms that have been established and that have this heaviness that New York kind of has. Los Angeles affords artists to really play in a very different way than anywhere else. I think it’s due to the distance between artists, and that you’re not concentrated, and we’ve talked about this, but it was shocking in New York to go and meet up with my artist friends and they’re talking about the auction prices, what sold for what, and they’re very much commercially driven, critically engaged artists that were very concerned about the money aspect of it. I think in Los Angeles, you’d be kicked out if you talked about it. I don’t think you can really think about it [fame and money] and talk about it that much because there’s so much distance between people, you’re not under the microscope the way that you are in New York. There’s this extreme push there to make it. More interesting things can happen here.

Cody: The difference between New York and Los Angeles is kind of jarring, but it does feel like a more organic and permissive community here. Do you feel that that’s changed? Has it always been the same art scene or has it shifted and morphed?

Sarah: I think it has become more sophisticated. By that I mean that more work has been really recognized internationally coming out of Los Angeles.  Which really changed the perception of if you could be a viable artist within Los Angeles, or whether something really significant could come out of Los Angels.  The joke has always been that in order to really make it as a Los Angeles artist have to go to Europe, then once you’re recognized in Europe, New York will say “Okay, I guess they’re all right” then you come back to LA and they say “Oh! Our hero.” [The perception that] Los Angeles still doesn’t have that ego or enough history under it’s belt or confidence to know what’s good, has changed. [There’s] enough good, interesting art, more of it shown. The [point of] view of people that look at it, artists, collectors and writers, whatever- are all influenced by that. Yeah it has changed.

Cody: Part of that question is also thinking of the Pacific Standard Time project that’s going to take over Los Angeles really soon. It feels like everyone wants to cement that history in some way. Looking back on it now, you, Meg, Larry and Mitchell all used to show together, right?

Sarah: Yes

Cody: It’s a funny way to think about the art world here because it’s both very expansive and stretched out, but then it’s like family in some way. It cycles back over and over again.

Sarah: It does, but it’s probably the same in New York I would imagine. That the people that you come up with, show with, dialog with, you’re really looking at each other’s work, they are your family. It sort of becomes a different kind of family. You’re always supporting each other and then looking at each other’s work and then talking about other things, then there’s these vast years where you won’t see them, then you’re coming back again. But you’ve shared this significant period together kind of coming up. I don’t know if you feel that way.

Cody: Well, there’s the CalArts mafia. 

Sarah: Well that was the thing. I sort of fell into the CalArts mafia. That was how I got into even showing in the first place.

Cody: You were an honorary member?

Sarah: Yeah I was going to UCLA and I was working at Art Catalogs, which is a great bookstore. The guy that worked at Asher Faure [Gallery] went to CalArts, Chris Wilder. Chris would come over every day to use our mail machine, we got to talking and he said, oh there’s a gallery, DAG, why don’t you bring a piece and hang it up? I thought, Oh my god, this is amazing. Coming out of UCLA there was no... there is a place for that mafia, because there was no support [at UCLA], no teachers supported you or looked after you, students were all very competitive. It was a very different atmosphere. So, falling into the CalArts group was fantastic because they really were open and really just loved art and wanted to just get as many people involved in what they were doing. Yeah, I’m an honorary member.

Transcript of a talk given at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on Thursday, March 31st, 2011.