BmoreArt

In the carefully-considered linear experience of the exhibition, “Asterion” the mechanical bull is the intended denouement—the literal minotaur at the center of its namesake labyrinth—but it’s as good a place as any to begin discussing Burke’s byzantine artistic practice. Comprising a laundry list of materials from steel to resin, electronics to fiberglass (as well as hours of troubleshooting and tinkering from a small army of helpers coming-and-going) it represents a monumental investment of labor and resources for an object that might border on camp in the rodeo of any other artist. And maybe that’s the point—or, well, one of them.

In the delightfully weird world of Zody Burke, humor and criticality, kitsch and classicism, labor and consumption, pop culture and literary allusions—all are tangential and related. Have you ever found yourself wondering what French theorist Guy Debord would think of a strip mall Home Goods? Or googling the reception of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in the post-Soviet world? (True story: in the weeks I’ve spent mulling Burke’s exhibition, I have!) And if the great authors of Latin American Magical Realism pioneered the trope of “the unreliable narrator,” Burke has perfected it. Or maybe dissected it? Laid it bare as not-so-magical reality in the post-internet age of “main character syndrome” and constructed identity?

Borges’ short story The House of Asterion is famously told from the perspective of a solitary shut-in protagonist, who introduces themself: “I know they accuse me of arrogance, perhaps also of misanthropy, perhaps also madness. Such accusations (which I shall castigate in due course) are laughable.” The last line, spoken by the Greek hero Theseus to Ariadne, subtly reveals that the introspective (and defensive) story is their classic myth, retold from the perspective of the minotaur they entered the labyrinth to slay.

Zody Burke’s version—in gorgeous risography, like all the printed matter in the exhibition—adds more layers of uncertainty. The text drifts from mythology in the classical sense toward the American dream: Asterion imagines himself floating through pristine elements of an infinite suburban home, above beige carpeting, granite countertops, and unused wine glasses. It is the myth of the algorithm: the home made commodity made image.

Who is the hero in this epic? Who is the monster? There’s enough of the artist in each of her lovingly-crafted depictions of classical figures to suggest she might identify with any and all. “Ariadne, or the Hanged Nymph,” looming over the remains of fallen soldiers? It’s hard not to see the minotaur’s mother “Pasiphaë, Queen of the Rodeo” as a self portrait. A cowgirl emerges from the head of a bull like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. Look closely and she’s wearing patches with messages of self-empowerment. But her Pinocchio nose perhaps suggests she might be somewhat of an unreliable narrator herself, if not unstable. The fragile plaster sculpture, after all,  is precariously perched on spindly legs that could’ve been plucked from the banister of the beast’s suburban dream home.

When I point out how nervous the sculpture makes me, Burke laughs and tells me she brought it with her on a ferry to Sweden for a two-person show earlier this year. The sculpture survived, and more surprisingly, neither crew nor fellow passengers seemed shocked by its presence.

The quick succession of labor-intensive, high-concept exhibitions, projects, and works for group shows that Burke executes in a wild assortment of fabrication techniques (she has multiple shows coming up both in Estonia and the U.S.) would be mind-blowing if I weren’t familiar with her work ethic.

For years Burke was a wise-cracking fixture in my group of friends and collaborators in Baltimore—with notable absences doing things like hopping freight trains cross-country or building her own dwelling by hand in a Brooklyn, NY backyard—organizing experimental music shows in warehouses, publishing dense zines full of horror vacui illustrations, tinkering with electronics, and mending and embellishing garments with a needle and thread late into the night while everyone else’s hands were occupied exclusively by beers and cigarettes. 

It’s that near-obsessive desire to be constantly, simultaneously experiencing and producing that makes her work so successful. An inside joke or wry observation might be slowly disassembled and rapidly rewoven with critical threads into something that feels smart and generous—in a matter of weeks, for example, Burke taught herself the labor-intensive Italian plaster technique scagliola to fabricate miniature columns as plinths for the free risographs visitors are encouraged to read as they wander The House of Asterion. It’s one of the quietest details in a content-packed show that I find myself thinking back on. The exhibition text itself becomes elevated into a precious object, displayed on endearingly handmade signifiers of faux-luxury. 

That feeling of generosity—of being invited into the artist’s interior world, where puzzles and decryption keys are scattered like relics in an excavation—is oddly exhilarating, and seems to have paid off. Burke’s opening earlier this month was so well-attended we had to spill into the street for her artist talk. In the days preceding and following the event, a stream of reporters from print, radio, and national TV news trickled through the gallery and her studio for interviews. I think I know Zody Burke well enough to imagine she’s going to groan reading this, but I felt like we were witnessing an art star on the rise. 

Zody Burke will be showing in New York at the Esther Art Fair, May 6-10. We caught up to discuss that upcoming show, the reception The House of Asterion has received during its run, and everything from psychogeography to Coney Island.

Michael Anthony Farley: I feel like so much has happened since you moved to Tallinn! When was that again?

Zody Burke: It was 2021. Just after the pandemic—because, uhhhh—the pandemic definitely played a critical role in my decision to get the fuck out of the USA.

Yeah, hard same! I just remembered talking about how we both wanted to leave the US over pizza during the pandemic! It was—I think—the last time we were both in Baltimore at the same time. You guys were staying with me… sleeping on the floor in my library when Adso [Zody’s large, rambunctious dog] was a slightly smaller wee monster, and we used to go get socially-distanced pizza outside at Trinacria. 

My COVID-era memory is like a sieve honestly, I think I’ve blocked that one out…

But in four years, it seems like your adopted city has really adopted you. You have so many shows coming up, so much support—it’s pretty wild to think the national radio station and television crews came to cover your solo show! 

Yeah, I love it here! It’s not hard to get noticed in Tallinn. There’s plenty of opportunities to go around. Actually the reason why Tallinn appealed to me initially—one of the reasons—is that the population size is pretty much the same as Baltimore. And you can kind of feel that in the size of the city and the way that people interact with each other—it’s kind of tight-knit.

It’s easy to have a handle on the interesting happenings within a city of this size without experiencing too much fomo. But obviously as a non-Estonian or Russian speaker, I’m on the outside a lot of the time. But I work hard, and you know, it’s starting to pay off. I have a lot of Estonian friends whom I love dearly. It’s been such a cool experience moving to the other side of the planet and finding a whole new set of people, people who are so different from anyone I’ve been close with back home in many ways… But that’s what makes it extra special having found our common interests and goals.

In the brief time I was in Tallinn I was pretty blown away by how robust the culture sector is. And this is wild—It’s actually smaller than Baltimore city-proper wise—but I just Googled this and there are less people in all of Estonia than even just the Baltimore suburbs. And yet Estonia produces so many great artists, musicians, designers…

There’s definitely no shortage of creative people who inspire me here, whether they’ve become friends or I’ve admired them from afar—Norman Orro, Pire Sova & Ando Naulainen, Joonas Timmi, Johannes Luik, the Uru Valter collective, Darja Popolitova, Netti Nüganen, Madlen Hirtentreu, Gregor Kulla, Maria Metsalu, and Alexei Gordin to name a few. There’s also my favorite oldschool heavy hitters Jüri Arrak, Concordia Klar and Ilmar Malin, whose iconic motifs have found their way into cameo roles in my own work. Estonian design is definitely on a whole other level—the Sorcerer collective makes the coolest garments and accessories I’ve ever seen, and I’m lucky to own some iconic jewelry pieces from Gohara Ruya and Erik Merisalu. Musically speaking, Maria Minerva is undoubtedly credited with putting Tallinn on the map for me, and I’m also a fan of the contemporary projects Lolina, Holy Motors, Icahera, and Ines DaFerrari.

Actually, it made me really happy at the opening just to see that you do have this huge friend/collaborator group and the way that you acknowledged that you can take on these ambitious projects and experiment with materials and massive, technically difficult things because you have people that will help you and want to help figure shit out… 

That has been a thing that I had really been missing about the community we had in Baltimore. It took me a while to find that in Europe—the kind of “it takes a weirdo village” sort of art-making that always ends up being more fun. Just the technical challenges of something like a mechanical bull—it’s insane that you pulled that off—it seems like you always are willing to experiment with new materials and take risks. And you have this very obvious joy of making that is so much a part of the appeal of your work to me. Like, you seem to enjoy the act of making even when it’s a pain in the ass? 

Yeah, I mean, I don’t always enjoy it! It’s very often more of a compulsion—It’s like a mental health thing. I need to do these things for some reason, which remains elusive to me. It’s kind of always been this way. But I do think that my brain chemistry shifted when I moved here. I was able to have access to a lot of facilities through the master’s program that I graduated from last year. And we also got studio space—it was the first time in my life that I’ve had a big studio that I didn’t have to really suffer to be able to afford.

American artists are so used to living with a scarcity mindset. After Baltimore, I spent a few years back home in Brooklyn trying to figure it out, and even after finding my way through various professional backdoors via a combination of persistence and New York City brand nepotism, I still found myself barely able to afford rent most of the time, much less facilitate a studio practice. I chose this program in Tallinn because it was actually affordable, if you can believe it: an affordable Masters degree…  and it offered a lot of freedom. I think this has been really integral with my own drive and ambition—it’s made it possible to keep pushing, experimenting and trying new things. It’s been really cool to have that change.

What is the name of the program?

The Master of Contemporary Art program at EKA, the Estonian Academy of Art. EKA doesn’t have a master’s program for painting or photography or digital art—it’s kind of all lumped into one—pretty similar to MICA’s undergrad Interdisciplinary Sculpture program. It’s a space to do something a little bit unconventional, or something that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. There’s not a whole lot of oversight—which was not something I loved about the program—but there was a lot of freedom to just do pretty much whatever you want.

What was your department at MICA?

It was Interdisciplinary Sculpture at the end. But I started in General Fine Arts with a minor in Illustration and… um, yeah… that didn’t work for me very well. I mean you knew me back then – I was kind of a chaos gremlin. I remember the GFA professor telling me at a crit, “You know, not all artists need to go to school and get a degree. Maybe you don’t need to do this?”

Because I was really failing, you know? They just didn’t understand what I was doing and I didn’t really understand what I was doing either. The Illustration minor also didn’t last very long. I remember one day the teacher—she was really sweet and cool—but she gave us an assignment which was to draw a poster for MICA’s Star Wars themed party.

And I was just like, “I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Like, I cannot be graded on Star Wars fan art. I’m sorry. I’m gonna drop this class.” And she was like, “Okay, yeah, I get it.”

It’s funny. We were talking about this earlier—the frustration artists can feel when their intent isn’t legible, or translatable or functional in an artwork. And to me, that’s one of the big distinctions between how something like ‘an illustration’ or ‘design’ object and an ‘artwork’ functions. I don’t always personally care if people walk away with totally the wrong take from an artwork—to me that’s part of the magic. But in grad school, especially for illustrators, there’s this mandate to be able to translate a concept to/from language to object, right? And now that that’s kind of like my ‘day job’, I realize I often like art that resists easy interpretation. 

In your work, I really love that there are so many references you pull from, that viewers can pull from, and maybe not everyone will “get” all of them. But I know it’s been a point of frustration for you that sometimes people latch onto one thing and run with that as if it were your sole intent or message. 

Yeah. It’s this really intense push-and-pull with me. I think the biggest crux of my practice is legibility and trying to negotiate how legible I want to be. I mean—I’m coming from the perspective of somebody who grew up drawing comics, making illustrations that are very linear, that have a story that goes along with them.

And even just the nature of comic art or drawing figures, faces, and bodies—you learn how to get really expressive, and kind of manipulate the emotions of the viewer. Because if you draw somebody who looks really sad, it’s like there’s not really much else you can get from that other than this character is sad, you know? I guess the context comes into it in different ways, but right now I think I am struggling with being misunderstood.

Specifically after this exhibition, it was kind of painful for me to get this one review from an Estonian art criticism platform.

I was using these very strong references—I would say actually quite cartoonish references to the USA—you know, this hyper-sexualized cowgirl figure with her tits out, and a functioning mechanical bull in the gallery—very American symbols. And as somebody who, like you, grew up with these things in our peripheral vision instead of just on the TV or something, we are kind of able to contextualize them or look underneath them, dig under them a little bit and look at the context that the thing is placed in, and use that to inform the relationship of the object with the space or the story or the narrative.

The narrative I placed these pieces in was inspired by The House of Asterion, Jorge Borges’ short story told from the perspective of the minotaur, from within the labyrinth, and it attempted to follow the arc of the story in a spatial manner. The story was printed on sheets and made available to read in the gallery.

Nevertheless, the reviewer seemed totally ill-equipped to see the pieces as anything other than what they literally were. It was really interesting. The loudness of the American symbolism, of the mechanical bull in particular, evidently caused them to completely miss the nucleus of the show—which was that the bull was the stand-in for the minotaur in the labyrinth—something I thought was so blatantly obvious I didn’t want to insult the intelligence of viewers by spelling it out.

Maybe these symbols just mean something very two-dimensional to people who have never had to really look at them or think about them, and maybe it provokes kind of an anti-intellectual allergy, when people see iconography they equate with ignorance, or like a facet of a culture they disapprove of. Or maybe I just need to consider beating people over the head with my concepts harder instead of relying on them to figure things out!

It’s a weird balance. I mean, I would love to say that I’m not opposed to relinquishing control and letting people draw their own conclusions from what I put out there. But this type of behavior, what I see as willful ignorance or laziness, is hard for me to swallow. In a level of negligence that actually stunned me, especially coming from a supposedly well-regarded institution. This reviewer even misattributed some of my own writing about the work to someone else. Like, go ahead and be sardonic about what you’ve interpreted as the message of the show all you want, but that’s just unprofessional.

After I read the review I went on a minor tear on Instagram stories because it reminded me of this one time during my MFA program, when an Estonian professor began a class by playing us the riff from “Born in the USA” on a loop. I don’t remember what his point was, but part of it relied on the widely held assumption, according to him, that it was the dumbest and most annoying song ever written.

So okay, bear with me—this professor, who had made this decision, and shared it with us in an academic context—turns out had never paid attention to the lyrics to the song beyond the chorus, and had no idea that the song is actually very obviously anti-US and about the failure of the American project. I mean sure, the song is annoying. I won’t dispute that. But he took at point blank face value the earwormy-ness of the four-word message in the chorus and treated it as a canonical example of American stupidity and vanity.

The type of almost intentional myopia it took to reach this conclusion prevented him from any attempt to look beneath the memetic symbolism of the chorus for any evidence of Springsteen using these tools to subvert themselves—to create a thinly veiled critique of the persona he was embodying.

I think there’s somewhat of a crosscurrent with a lot of your interests—a kind of idea of constructed identity. One of the things I take away from a lot of your cowboy imagery is like a push/pull of the idea of ‘rugged individualism’ and the hero myth… but then it’s the irony of a whole subculture of signifying belonging to a culture that collectively believes in rugged individualism? Does that make any sense?

Yeah. I mean, I’m from Brooklyn! Like the cowboy shit… that’s not my culture! But when I moved here, you know, you’re American, that’s like what you are, right? For all the smack some Europeans might talk about Americans not knowing geography, the kind of spatial-cultural flattening people are willing to impart on the USA can get pretty absurd. I try not to be too cynical about it…

I just realized: maybe “cowboy” could almost function as a sort of stand-in for our mutual history/love/hate/frustration with punk and DIY culture? Like, the play between constructed, performative individualism as a way of belonging to a subculture?

Yeah! Also these identities are multi-generational and old, you know? I mean, punk is geriatric at this point! It has kind of entered into the annals of history just as much as the cowboy has, you know? And people are still treating it like it’s this contemporary thing. But just the way that these kinds of archetypes sort of mutate and evolve over decades or become distorted or transformed and even contradict themselves when you push them through different cultural filters and lenses… I think that is really interesting.

…And even your appropriation of that “Live, Laugh, Love”—like, Airbnb decor—aesthetic is playing with another kind of signifier of individualistic conformity, if that makes any sense? Like there’s a weirdly “main character syndrome” vibe to all those fridge magnets out there with “whacky” text saying stuff like “Not now! It’s wine-o-clock for mommy somewhere…” 

Totally. I mean, I think the kind of ubiquity of this sort of ‘suburban wine mom’ aesthetic—it feels like almost a stand-in for an absence of an aesthetic. It’s normal to walk into an Airbnb or your friends’ parents house in the county or wherever and expect to see stuff like that. It becomes almost invisible, I mean, I wouldn’t honestly assume that there’s much set intention that happens behind it, right?

But there obviously is intention there, and these are aesthetic markers used by a subculture to signify a type of belonging, just like studded jackets or cowboy boots or whatever else might be. Even if that ‘belonging’ is more isolated and happens behind closed doors.

Okay. One of the weirdest things to me that I constantly notice and use as an example of the American illusion of choice… Have you ever noticed that almost every single door in the United States is the exact same door?

No.

It’s become invisible by its ubiquity! It’s that damn ugly faux-woodgrain door with the four fake beveled panels. You know it when you see it. I didn’t ever really think about this until we all moved into City Arts, and I was like what architect thought this was a good door to put in a building intended as artists housing where that texture makes it impossible to clean and doesn’t even fit the already-faux-loft aesthetic? But it’s just the default door for seemingly every American interior since the 1980s. 

It’s the Home Depot-ification of the West.

Exactly! Try to order a door online in the US, and the first 4 pages of results will be some  variation of this terrible design. But search for a door using a VPN and any language other than English and a whole world of doors opens before you in a spectrum of colors and textures and actual materials other than shitty textured particle board. I know this sounds like an aside, but bear with me, this is my segue: when we were neighbors in Baltimore I feel like we were both really into the situationists and talked about this?

Yeah, there was a time. It’s fuzzy now, but it was there.

Do you find yourself constantly thinking about psychogeography in Tallinn? 

Definitely. A part of my thesis actually revolved around this made-up concept called “psychocartography” which was kind of a branching off of Guy Debord’s definition.

I wanted to try to take it a step further, by trying to not only think about people’s emotional responses to architecture, but also to consider the material, political and economic components in urban environments, and the effect of those things on the orientation or disorientation of the viewer, or public space-experiencer. Things like branding, chain businesses, literal materials and possible circumstances of their extraction, the visibility or invisibility of labor and money, and how the combination of these things might influence individual or group psychology.

I think that also just being in Tallinn in general… it’s extremely architecturally schizophrenic in a way that no other city I’ve ever been in is. There’s the circular medieval part of town, and then everything kind of branches out like a sun around it. You have like the old concrete Soviet apartment blocs which are for all intents and purposes the Russian-speaking projects.

And then there’s the old wooden houses that are very Baltic. And then there’s the new Scandinavian condos—how Estonia wants to be seen. There’s the desiccated remains of Soviet era industry everywhere. And finally there’s the smattering of giant mall complexes here and there, punctuating these extremely different districts… it can feel really intensely vibe-shifty travelling between neighborhoods.

Yes! There’s even the gentrified waterfront condo zones that look and feel exactly like Canton in Baltimore with the same new faux-industrial architecture. I couldn’t stop thinking about the psychogeography chaos. And all these different places are so disjointed from one another in a way I had never experienced in a European city, except maybe some parts of Berlin over a decade ago. Like you have to cross a rocky field or parking lot or 8 lane street or take a tram through a stretch of town with no sidewalks to arrive in a totally different “human habitat” with a totally different logic, or built to demonstrate a different ideology.

It’s funny because you were born in Manhattan and I now live in Barcelona’s Eixample—they’re probably the two most iconic city grids in the world—where you can walk from streets and buildings that are 200 years old, or 2000 years old, respectively, to skyscraper districts or parks and have this continual urban experience where you feel like you’re in the same city. It’s a gradual dérive regulated by structure and density. I’m thinking of that illustration “The City of the Captive Globe” in Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York… But in Tallinn everything has a border with liminal space between! And I feel like I see this psychogeographical influence in your work here—the labyrinth, the itinerant architectural details floating… 

Yeah, Tallinn’s neighborhoods are just kind of representative of different decades of economic and cultural fluctuation, or centuries or millennia even, jigsawed together in this way that feels very disorienting for an American like me who obviously has no relationship other than a touristic one with medieval architecture, much less Soviet architecture.

The Rem Koolhaas reference that you just brought up is super important to me too, I feel like Delirious New York is kind of magical realism psychogeography, it’s like an emotional undergirding of architecture and neighborhoods, and a creative interpretation of what syntheses of group desire can do to public space. I’ve referenced that book a lot in my work, specifically the chapters about Coney Island. I love that stuff.

Koolhaas framed turn-of-the-century Coney Island as this playground of the hyperreal, before Baudrillard—the subconscious desires of the public manifesting in this very strange arena where people are just dumping money so anything is kind of viewed as possible, he called it Manhattanism. Have you seen the images of the giant elephant-shaped hotel that used to be there? Super crazy…  and then, you know, it all burned down in the 20s. It was like the tower of Babel, it was too much, it touched God’s face or whatever and couldn’t exist for long.

I just remember this one beautiful anecdote where he wrote about all the zoo animals, they’re running out of Dreamland while it burns. And you know, some of them escape too late. They die in the flames. There’s these lions with manes on fire. And the police are pointing guns at them while they’re in flames running down Surf Avenue. It’s totally tragic and absurd. And for decades after the fire, residents of Coney Island catch glimpses of the surviving zoo animals adapting to their new environment, spotting zebras and gazelles or whatever on the boardwalks eating from the trash or vanishing into the weird grasslands of the peninsula.

I feel like that is like the most accurate weird little description of your work/world—like, flaming zoo animals escaping a burning Coney Island to become scavengers…

Yeah. Lions escaping from a zoo, on fire, with police pointing guns at them.

I think that’s a good segue into one of my absolute favorite projects of yours: the “Jacuzzi Demolition Service!” For people who are not familiar with this, I’m going to paraphrase it and correct me if I’m wrong… you were visiting the suburbs in the US and noticing all of these backyard jacuzzis that have just been abandoned… that once were a status symbol and the idea of upper-middle-class conspicuous leisure under American capitalism in the 80s… like, “Oh, this luxury of soaking in a backyard jacuzzi.”

But then in reality they became this costly maintenance nightmare full of disgusting fungi and just sat rotting in everyone’s backyards. And then in the industrial complex where you have your studio in Estonia, you found the old molds for casting giant Soviet monuments that have just been abandoned forever too… and they were sort of this visual analog of a similar form born from a totally different ideology that both ended up being detritus. I love that you cut those up and made this installation that almost forms a conversation pit, but no longer serves a function either as a mold or as a jacuzzi, while simultaneously suggesting both?

Yeah, it’s funny. I feel like I got a little criticism for that piece because I worked with a lot of styrofoam. Some people really hate it when you work with styrofoam! What initially inspired me to start the Hot Tub series was the strange ergonomics—like, the almost psychosexual appearance of a jacuzzi—these sensual curving plateaus that mimic a naked human body at rest in a social setting. I did a bunch of little illustrations, sort of like tiles, and just enjoyed playing with the absence of the body but the implication of its presence. I got really obsessed with it. Sort of in a horny way.

Yeah. Empty Jacuzzis look like they should be the gynecologist’s office on a starship designed by H.R. Giger 

Yeah definitely, or maybe something Cronenbergian once they fall into disrepair. I don’t know what else there is to say about it really other than what you already said. I think that most Americans who have any sort of relationship with the suburbs have been in or around a jacuzzi that didn’t work properly.

Totally.

It’s a very visceral sort of smell… and the feeling of too much chlorine in the bubbles irritating your skin. The hot tub is such a weirdly excessive but also banal object—you know, these things are huge and they’re so expensive to maintain, there’s a whole industry that exists for removing broken jacuzzis from your backyard because no one wants to be bothered to do it. It’s such a pain in the ass. They’re so heavy.

So you call a number and someone shows up in your backyard with a chainsaw and just like, bisects the thing, and hauls it away. I spent a lot of time looking at a lot of photos and videos of that process, which is absolutely beautiful. And I decided I wanted to make this sculpture and have it exist in three different stages, where the actual dismembering of the jacuzzi was a performance with a video record.

One thing I didn’t get to check off the list I had made when looking up things to do in Tallinn: apparently there’s a gay sauna that has the most wild Google reviews I have ever seen. And the number one complaint is that the jacuzzi smells weird, is way too cold, and is only used by sketchy gay Russian mob-looking guys? Now you know I will be back to visit. 

You know, for a country in Northern Europe, you would think their jacuzzis would be warmer, but I’ve never been in a jacuzzi in Estonia that was quite warm enough.

The more I think about your consideration of quasi-architectures, the more I am irked on a professional level by that art critic who talked about your use of plaster in The House of Asterion as being reflective of American Hollywood artifice or whatever? To me, almost instantly, I felt like they were about architectural displacement, the built environment made labyrinth or ruin… Back to psychogeography, I think it’s those kind of the fossilized “negative spaces” between destinations in Tallinn that are so interesting to me—like you can be walking from one neighborhood to another and pass vacant lots with the ruins of a chimney or corner of a wall or stone arch where a building used to be. I actually thought of Baltimore a lot. 

Yeah. Totally, in that way and others, there are more parallels between Baltimore and Tallinn than one might think.

I think the floating architectural elements, especially for this exhibition, were important to me because, you know, the show is called “The House of Asterion,” Asterion is the minotaur’s birth name, and the minotaur’s house is the labyrinth, right? I could have literally built a maze into the space.

I guess if I really wanted to work myself that hard I could have done that, but it was very intentional that I didn’t. I think having these floating pieces which imply that you are in a type of environment instead of literally attempting to situate you in that environment might lead you to question your body’s role in the space. If I’m saying that this is a labyrinth, that this exhibition is a labyrinth, but there’s no maze, there’s no walls shuffling you around, maybe what I’m trying to illustrate is that the labyrinth is always there. Maybe the implication of the labyrinth isn’t quite so literal, it’s more psychological.

Yeah. Hm. I like that. That reminds me, I don’t know how the hell you have your finger so firmly on the pulse of cultural zeitgeist that basically immediately after you open an exhibition, some mainstream pop diva goes for the same aesthetic! I can’t believe now it’s Lady Gaga, but first the fact that Beyonce randomly became a cowgirl out of the blue a week or so after your cowboy show…

Not even a cowgirl but THE cowgirl! The blonde, head-to-toe denim-clad cowgirl who I’ve been depicting in my work for years, through everything from drawing to sculptural effigy to dressing up like her myself. I mean, we all know I’m not the first person to pull this archetype out of the ether—it’s very much kind of like a Dolly Parton referential thing as well, and Madonna did it too in the early aughts—but yeah, this zeitgeist phenomenon is something I brush up against occasionally.

It’s perplexing and disorienting. I’ve learned not to become alienated and bitter about it, which is definitely something I struggled with when I was younger. I’ve found it helpful to remind myself that holding aesthetics as central to your identity often causes long-term psychic pain, and it’s important to be humble and give yourself space to be mutable in that regard.

No, like the most uncanny thing to me: while I was waiting for my photos from your show to batch resize, I was just absent-mindedly flipping through Instagram stories and a friend at Coachella was filming Lady Gaga emerging from sand surrounded by skeleton dancers and it looked so much like your installation I thought I was having a minor stroke. 

I would never be so vain as to think that Lady Gaga would rip me off, but I will say that she has ripped off people I know, and that’s a fact!

Yeah. I don’t know. I think maybe having diverse interests while also being a more or less productive artist…. kind of just like… shit like this is bound to happen, you know?

Well, I think it also just speaks to that strength of yours: synthesizing very unexpected points of reference into things that then become so oddly specific that they start to feel universal, if that makes any sense?

Yeah, this is something that I think about kind of constantly but maybe in a more passive way… synthesizing cultural touch points that feel extremely contemporary, thinking about what they mean and why they’re important right now, because there’s always a reason. It’s never really as simple as ‘oh, denim is popular again because of Y2K nostalgia’ – that’s obviously a relevant variable, but there’s so much more going on that you can dig up.

My personal interest in denim has a lot to do with the post-Soviet context. In Estonia, denim was used as a currency on the black market for a while, as a symbol of a Western freedom ideology that felt very far away and unattainable at the time. But yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s easy to be critical of artists and art that make use of ‘buzzy’ iconography. But I think ultimately people who are critical of this are operating in sort of a neophobic fear, or at worst a totally exhausted anti-feminism… which is like, really boring. Disingenuous, too. My art has been called ‘instagrammable’ in a derogatory way.

I resent the implication that these sort of girl-coded tools are inherently flippant because they are being activated by artists like me, who are making work while being aware of being perceived. Sometimes Europeans have really shocked me with their unwillingness to give young, feminine artists the benefit of agency or possession of critical thought. It’s like, you’re in the labyrinth too, jackass.

Where was “Ways of Seeing” while you were studying? People are simultaneously afraid of and dismissive of sexiness, even in 2025. It’s like being scared of teenage girls, and I put it in the same category of lazy misogyny. It’s like, obviously these things have power. That’s why they’re trending. That’s why they’re buzzy. Why aren’t you curious about that power at all?

And in general I have been noticing an interest in the aesthetics of archeology and classical ruins, which I think might reflect a generational anxiety about the apocalypse? Someone said something along the lines of “we’re the first civilization knowingly documenting its own demise.” I am not sure that’s true, but I do think that as people who grew up after the Victorian-kinda era of anthropology and archeology and museums, and then watched atom bombs and climate change, we’re at a weird point in time where people are thinking about the legacy we’re leaving future archeologists. Like, will someone one day find my fossilized phone in the irradiated ruins of a Hot Topic in a long-submerged mall? 

Yeah, I think it’s an obsession with us as a species desperately wanting there to be a record of our existence, especially because let’s be honest… the way that things are going, there’s going to be no record. We like to entertain ourselves with thoughts like ‘you know, in a few centuries, they’re going to find my Nokia brick phone or whatever’, but that’s wishful thinking, isn’t it? 

I think we’re kind of at the end of archaeology right now, because as a species we’ve just generated so much shit. Whatever value modern archaeologists might imbue some Neolithic artifacts with, nobody will ever think anything that anthropocene humans generated has any value whatsoever. I’m talking aliens, future humans or otherwise. There’s just way too much shit and there’s no more archaeology. This is the line in the sand. That’s it.

Speaking of future archeology, let’s talk about the work you’re sending to New York next month!

Yeah! I have a very large sculptural piece, it’s two high reliefs mounted on a scaffold, that were somehow amazingly shipped from Tallinn to New York City. They’ll be shown in the Estonian Culture House for the Esther Art Fair, May 6-10, during Frieze.

It’s run by Olga Temnikova who is a gallerist here, who I’m also going to be doing an exhibition with next year here in Tallinn, and also Margot Samel, who has a gallery in Manhattan and is also originally from Estonia. This is the second Esther Art Fair and I’m really excited to see the work. I’ve been following some of the emerging artists and galleries who are involved for a while.

I’ll also be doing a live performance at the fair on May 9, under the moniker of my formerly solo music project Sapphogeist, but this time I will be joined on guitar by my good friend Chouser aka Chevrolet Pile. 

It’s cool. I mean, I won’t lie, it is really strange being from New York and then, you know, this is how I’m able to show in New York. I’ve never had anything in an art fair in New York before, but now I’ve kind of been injected into this category of something “other” than your average New Yorker. And it’s being presented through this context of the relationship between Tallinn and New York, which obviously makes sense as I’m somebody with a foot in both places. To be fair the work itself is referential to that relationship as well. It came from an interest in contrasting the industrial extractive histories in Estonia and the USA, and the connections between industry and leisure culture.

Speaking of your performance and music, you are totally the definition of my favorite word I made up: gesamtkunstwerkaholic. Like your labor-intensive sculptures and drawings and garments and musicall feel like they exist in the same world, which is a world I am happy I get to visit from time to time. 

Well, they do. They have to, you know.

I don’t know how to make or do things that are separate from each other. It’s all rooted in the same body, if that makes sense. I can’t separate one facet of my interests from another because these things have relationships. And if those relationships aren’t immediately obvious, I think it’s my duty to tease them out.