JUAN PINZON, INTERVIEWED BY EMMA WOMBLE

Photographed by Jo Silver for the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation

STATEMENT - My practice centers around objects that have fallen away from their original use. The sculptures of varied scales relate pedestrian materials, focusing on the way they engage and distort each other and our preconceptions about them. The forms defamiliarize the familiar materials and evoke a sense of otherworldliness, awe, and reverence for things that would otherwise be overlooked.

Informed by new materialist theory, ecological and scientific research, and a practice of receptive observation, each piece emphasizes the subtle vibrance inherent to matter. The use of discarded organic and inorganic materials engages the tension between the short-sightedness of human actions and the longevity of their impacts. Currently, I am investigating the narratives that emerge when bivalves are considered beings that have borne witness to and been objects of our consumption throughout human history. Bivalves are masters of alchemy, their incredible filtering abilities are critical components to their ecosystems. The dissolved minerals they filter allow them to build their shells, which eventually appear in our cities’ materiality, such as food and limestone. I have been working on a series of vertebrae and wing-like formations made from cut and stacked clamshells that, through their form and material relationships, create a sense of myth around these creatures in pursuit of a renewed relationship between the viewer and the things that surround them.

Emma: In your artist statement, you talk about evoking a sense of otherworldliness. I am curious about what that looks like through your lens.
Juan: It's both about trying to identify something that is unfamiliar but is still rooted in the things that we know. So it's both otherworldliness and very much of our world. That is the quality of the objects I am finding and the point in time and the decomposition they are in. They are frozen to the point of going from new objects to fossils almost or dirt. That in-between stage is something that we don’t tend to look at, and it is unfamiliar because it is very much of our world.

E: So you are looking more at giving it another context in which to view it?
J: Yeah, like in the objects that I am finding and trying to retain that in the work that I make. Let the objects still be that strange thing that first struck me so that I was like, what is that? Trying to present them in a way that also does that for the viewer. Instead of being like here is this explained nice and tightly fit thing now. That has been an interesting line to try and figure out.

E: Research, materialist theory, and observation feel like key components to making your work. Is there any specific literature or media that influences those ideas?
J: Yeah, definitely, there are three very important books. The first one is a materialist text that most people know about, “Vibrant Matter” by Jane Bennet. She talks about matter as this vibrant, agentic force that engages with other things and has power or as she calls it “thing powers”. She talks about this puddle of pollen and a few other dispersed trash objects that created this atmosphere, which is exactly what I am going for. I'm trying to describe it in a way that isn't animistic, but at the end of the day, all materialist theory is animism. So, I am trying hard not to be, but she is really important.

The receptive observation comes from Jenny Odell who is an artist and author in California, but she might be around anywhere. Her work is great, and she wrote this book called “How to Do Nothing,” where she talks about birdwatching as an example of a non-goal-oriented activity. The goal is to see birds right, but you have very little control over which birds you are going to see or at what moment. Your job is maybe to go to a specific place and then just have an open, receptive stance to the world and be ready to hear them, see them, see any little movement, and then focus. The way she describes the granularity of her attention becoming more and more refined. Bring able to discern from just general birdsong, which it was at first, into Oh, that is that bird. Being able to do that, but my birds are this trash stuff you know. Then it's much bigger, and it's something that I can’t bring home with me that sticks. She is super influential, and her artwork is cool, too. She has a couple of projects that do this thing where she is showing you something and stripping away some of the context or adding more context that gives that thing more presence in a particular way. She has this one project at this residency at this place called “the dump.” I forget what it’s called, but it is in California. Basically, you do a residency, and you can go collect things from there and find incredible stuff, from Eme's chairs to an old cell phone. Her show was just a bunch of shelves with these objects on it, and she would do intense meticulous research on them, and you could use your phone to scan a QR code. You could see the factory where they were made and instances of them in culture. She had this one cell phone that you could see in use in movies, and it was like, that is that cellphone right there. Or that type of cellphone and that way of making this mundane thing have a full life was really interesting. The other stuff I like that she does is landscape images of Google Earth of big infrastructures like water treatment plants, waste management, that kinda thing. They are usually secluded and removed from our day-to-day. You know they're usually behind a bunch of trees. You don't want to see them, but they're like so critical to the way that we exist in the way that the city's run. She takes that image and then strips away all the green. So you just see this network of like a power plant and they're striking and huge in a way. They almost

look like I think she calls them satellite landscapes or something like that. But they almost look like constellations also. And there's this funny project where she took a road trip on Google Maps, and it was just like frame by frame going to places on Google Maps. But her ability to connect things to their history or place and stip that away so you can kind of see them more nakedly is an interesting thing for me, too.

E: Using bivalves in your work seems significant. Can you talk about that initial influence, if there was one?
J: Yeah, I've been trying to figure that out. The shells, and I'm just going to be more general because it's been these clam shells more recently. The beachy shell has been in my practice for a few years now. At first, it was just something that I had. I was doing a lot of this, like nesting stuff, at first, and it wasn't as intentional as it is now. I've seen them collect and collect and collect in my studio. I've been reading about them a lot more and just starting to establish a structure of what these objects are doing for me.

There's another important book for me called A Time for Everything, a novel by Carlo Van Huskart. It traces this guy's life who became interested in angels because he saw them in his youth. It was like this shocking moment because he had just done this terrible thing. He'd been like poking at an ant hill and was overcome with that feeling of both guilt and destroying it but also being unable to stop. Then he gets lost in the woods, and that kind of does it. So, throughout the book, the narrator kind of retells some classic bible stories, like Cain and Abel or Noah's Ark, and the characters are really complex and interesting, but the stories are much more nuanced. I was interested in the way that the angels existed in this story, especially in the beginning. Where they are supposed to be removed from people and enacting the will of God. Over time, instead of just observers and actors, they start to sympathize with people and indulge in a lot of human consumption. At the end of the day, that's what leads to the fall, right? So they end up stuck on earth and become more dependent on people. I mean, these are all kinds of spoilers, but they transform the way that they look, and they can't go back. As they become more and more dependent on people, they start turning into chairs, this kind of cutesy thing, gets them invited to the home. Then people start getting annoyed with them, sick of them, so they have to take a step out. Eventually, you get to this place where seagulls are contemporary angels, and they're still around as they eat their food. They're always like circling a human boat. I tried to extrapolate that framework for what these angels are doing, their relationship to people, and their consumption of these bivalves. Trying to create a similar sense of reverence and history around them.

My interest now in bivalves is their ability to filter entire bodies of water and how it is critical to a healthy ecosystem. Whatever they're filtering is an incredible alchemy that turns it into this hard shell, right? As that hard shell deteriorates, it turns into limestone which is an important ingredient in concrete that builds all our cities. In some ways, all our cities are built on clamshells. We have a very close relationship, and they're so mundane and looked over that if we could just look at them, just that slight little switch is exciting. Formally, the way that they stack and all these little details in them, when you look at them closely, start to emerge was exciting for me. I've tried to skew away from scallop shells or oyster shells just because scallop shells are overtly beautiful. It's the shell that Aphrodite emerged from; they got their own thing going, and they're fine. Oyster shells are just like, I don't know, kind of sexy, you know? Whereas these clam shells are just like the leftovers of food. It's what you find on the beach, and they become staples. To be able to push them out of that into something a little bit more intriguing. In some ways, what I'm doing with the shells is what I'm hoping to do with all the other stuff. I would like to look at it closely and differently because these have a real affinity to them. I think they're just beautiful, especially that little cross-section right in the middle.

E: I mean, they're gorgeous. I'm a big shell collector, too, whenever I go to the beach.
J: What kind of shells do you collect?

E: I've found a lot of spiral little shells, those are cool. I'll usually like go in the water and look through like the sand and stuff to like find them.
J: Have you ever cut one in half?

E: No. Most of the ones I think I've found are already either like one part. Do you have any specific sites or areas you lean towards in, like sourcing materials?
J: When I started this practice, I was in Richmond. I've learned Richmond has the perfect amount of trash because you would always find something. It wasn't an overwhelming amount and stuff. I had just started this journey, away from being broken off its original body and now just tumbling through time. I would always collect, but even in Richmond, I started to gravitate towards specific sites. There's this place called Belle Isle, which has a lot of history, and now it's a park. When people go there, they go swimming on the James River, but it has been a bunch of things throughout history. Among them, it was a small town for a little bit and had a small community and school. It was also a water treatment plant or maybe a hydroelectric plant. Even before that, it was an internment camp during the Civil War, and now it's just a park. It's been growing and reclaiming

spots, so you have all these places where nature is like growing, but the human infrastructure is becoming nature. It's that tension. There are all these stimulating moments that you'll find. My northern star object is this little piece of barbed wire driftwood from there. That was striking because I just found that sticking out of this fallen tree. What was cool is that it clearly showed this extended life of something after an original human action that's completely out of the logic of that action. I don't know if this story is about someone wrapping a tree in barbed wire, and then that was it. But that was the whole point. Or the tree grew around the barbed wire, then the tree fell into the river and was eaten away by termites, and 80, 100 years later, we end up with this perfect object. That's become the connecting point that makes that place special. I don't go there very much because I'm in New York now, but since moving, I've been walking around a lot and have been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of trash. It's all fresh, and it's too much. Bit by bit, I'll find little neighborhoods where the walking feels right, which works. In New York, I've been going to this place called Deadhorse Bay, which is relatively well known. It is similar to Bell Island it has a pretty good history to it, and it brings a lot of energy to the objects that are there. But, it was once a glue factory, hence the name. Then after a while, they turned it into a landfill, I think in the early 1900s, and they covered the landfill with topsoil. Now that the topsoil eroded you get all this 100-year-old trash that's been rolling around in the sand and the ocean washing up on the shore. You get these incredible objects that are human-like because they're all manufactured, so there's a lot of plastic, metal, and shoes. Since they've been tumbling and cleansed by the ocean and the sun they start to become organic. I have a couple of pieces of like that, PC or rubber. There's a piece over there that just looks like a bone, but it’s a big hook that's plastic.

E: It's plastic? I was about to say it looks like wood.
J: You'll also get these pretty amazing things like this newspaper rock. It is just a newspaper, and you can get little bits of comics or text that are different.

E: That's crazy. I never knew objects could transform into that.
J: Right. It's just plastic.

E: Plastic is one of those materials that I have never thought about eroding.
J: Right. Nicely, it is eroding or a forever material. That's a bit of my interest with the silicone stuff. These things are making their way into our waterways, the food we eat, and our bodies. They're now becoming part of the material makeup of the planet. There's a lot of climate anxiety that comes with it. It's a process of becoming part of the

earth, which is exciting. I was talking to someone recently about this idea of there being other intelligent species on Earth before humans. Thinking about how long it would take if people were to just disappear. For all of this to just really disappear and become a thin layer of sediment. You'd probably find a couple of incredible little things, but at the end of the day, it might be hard to identify. At some point, we'll have this little Anthropocene strip and then there will be something else that emerges after it, right?

E: Do you have any, favorite materials you've found, or worked with? I know that's, might be a hard question, because all of them have their special qualities.
J: Yeah, they're also special. I mean, that piece of barbaric driftwood has made its way into some works, and I was reclaiming it afterward. The wax has been exciting just as a base for these things. At the end of the day, my background is in woodworking. Woodworking, just being really precious and considerate with this material, I think, was a perfect place to start this path. It's something that I still hold very dear. Wood is important because it has an obvious form of life as a living, breathing organism. Even in its non-living tree state, it still expands and contracts. You have to consider that when you're working with it and allowing for it, so it doesn't bust out of the panel. Every hand plain stroke with the grain it starts to shift a little bit, depending on the way that it's going, so it has this infinite depth that I've come to appreciate. I’ve been able to extrapolate to other things that aren't as immediately obvious, like more uniform materials, wax, and metal, and I recognize that I am shifting things with these qualities. Wood smacked me in the face with that. It was a good starting place.

E: Were there any specific projects that you wanted to do while you were here at Stove Works?
J: There were a few. I was interested in working on these wax panels because they felt like a step towards making something that was frozen at that point of thinking. I haven't made many of them. I made a couple of pieces with wax or a lot of work with wax. But not in this way, so trying to see what it could do and the different ways to push it was exciting.

This summer, I'm a fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park, which is exciting for us. That's a big thing to work towards. There's been a lot of technical problems to figure out. I learned how to cast some of this stuff in meta as a mockup to see what these clam fronds look like. Because they'll be cast in iron and be much bigger, three or four feet long. Being able to get my hands on it and trying to see what these things do and how it's gonna work was an exciting thing being here.

E: What are your plans after this? Because I know it's coming to an end.
J: Yeah.

E: And you just said you're a fellow at the Socrates Sculpture Park.
J: That's my most immediate plan. I'll be at Socrates, an upper sculpture park in Queens right on the water. It's beautiful, I like that place. I'll be there all summer. We start the fellowship in early June and work through the whole summer. Then, in early September, the opening will occur, and the work will stay up from September through March. You’ll get to see the work through the seasons, which is exciting, and I like being able to play with some of that seasonal change and what becomes visible when the leaves drop. When things become a little bit more gray adding a little pop of color will just make that a little bit brighter. That's my main plan, but besides that, just get back to my life.

E: Yeah, I gotcha. That sounds exciting.
J: Yeah, I'm stoked.

RESIDENT SPOTLIGHT: JUAN-MANUEL PINZON