Braxton Garneau: It stems from a childhood fascination with Carnival. My paternal grandparents spoke to me about it from the time I was four or five years old, promising that one day I’d get to experience it with them. They described it as being this celebration of mythical proportions with grand costumes, music and dancing. As I got older, and the possibility of making that trip became more feasible, I wanted to really understand the roots of this celebration.

My grandparents moved back to Trinidad after 40 years in Canada, and at the age of 26, I went to experience Carnival with them. It’s still the most significant cultural celebration in Trinidad and has endured for nearly 200 years.

Given that my grandparents’ accounts were based on their experiences before the 60s and largely nostalgic, the idea that I had of Carnival was outdated by the time I experienced it. The history of Canboulay and the original costumes were an integral part of the celebrations when my grandparents were first experiencing it, but now those portions of the festivities have become a lot smaller and are not as popular.
Carnival is forever changing to represent contemporary concerns and ideas, but the whimsical and imaginative qualities that I envisioned as a child still continue to shape my work.

Often, when thinking about portraiture, in my practice, each subject stems from a fascination with the cultural context of a material, a personal experience or event, or in the case of the Carnival characters, a specific psychological function. It shifts from work to work. Sometimes, the themes will complement one another, and sometimes they contrast. My practice is really about me translating my thoughts into something tangible.

I think subconsciously I’m always pulling from the Dutch tradition of portraiture, which will range from these very extravagant depictions of nobility to very unflattering domestic scenarios and even caricature. You will see paintings of the artist’s mother, which are by no means flattering, but somehow very authentic and intimate. Those are some of the paintings I spend the most time with.
There is a portrait I painted of my brother based on a photograph taken from the moment he woke up. There is a certain intimacy captured there, yet the pose has the feeling of a strong classical aesthetic structure.
I love a balance of refined and natural elements—which also comes through in my use of material. I typically rely on realistic representations of a figure, but I incorporate material elements that are less refined or less processed, such as soil, raffia, bones and roots.

For me, material honesty means embracing the inherent qualities of the material that I’m using—letting the natural luster, texture, or value of that material shine in a piece. Many of my figurative works are without an identifiable background, and I use these materials as identifiers to contextualize them in a place or time within a certain cultural framework.
Materials like raffia and sugarcane tie my work to Trinidad and the greater African diaspora. The sugar industry, for example, was the reason that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to Trinidad. Trinidad was one of the most efficient exporters of sugar in the British West Indies. That industry shaped the landscape—the physical landscape of Trinidad and the sociocultural landscape. Including sugarcane in my paintings is a substitute for painting a sugarcane field in the background. It’s also one of those symbols that relies on the viewer’s own knowledge of the material. Not everyone will understand the correlations, but the material is a symbol known to those who have spent generations in proximity to it.

Exactly, I’m transposing that context into the figure.

I’m very conscious about the physical space when conceiving a show. Each one of these opportunities has provided very unique spaces that I am able to respond to. Ideally, my exhibitions will always contain both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, and I am able to create an environment as part of that experience.
For all of these exhibitions, the work was made specifically for the space as well as the location. For example, the show in Los Angeles considered the site of the La Brea Tar Pits, and the connections between La Brea Pitch Lake in Trinidad and the oil sands in Northern Alberta. For my latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta, I am again considering the site, but have removed the figure entirely. The exhibition still tells a story about people and place, but focuses on landscape as the main subject. This project has pushed my work into the realm of installation, focusing on expanding materials, and made me reconsider the relationship between the figure and the landscape.

In a way, they do. I’m placing the visitors between two bitumen-rich landmasses—one is centered around Alberta, where I was born and raised, and the other is centered around Trinidad and Pitch Lake. I see the visitor’s experience between these two physical masses as representative of my own experience as someone whose identity has been deeply informed by these two places. It’s also about the migration of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, specifically in the 60s as laborers in the extractive industries in Alberta.

During my first visit to Trinidad, I went to La Brea Pitch Lake, which is the largest natural asphalt deposit in the world. I was fascinated at seeing it in its various states and was excited by the mutability of the material. I love the idea of change and transformation. Asphalt embodies this as without an aggregate, it will always return to a puddle.
I was initially drawn to its formal qualities and it fed into my visual language, which relies on natural materials to contextualize my work.
Geographically, asphalt links my work to both Trinidad and Alberta. Alberta’s industry of extraction brought my paternal grandfather to Canada, along with many other Caribbeans. And that same industry employed my maternal grandfather. So, asphalt is this product of extraction that has sustained both sides of my family.

I think on the premise of a self-sufficient and self-enclosed territory, that is not made as a riff on another territory or inopposition to another territory.

It is its own territory. It is also a device to check on the intensity and accuracy of the object.

This is the first painting. It’s really fresh, it’s from yesterday.

Yeah, I hope you like it. I’m pleased with it.

It has been there for a very long time and a friend of mine took a photograph of it, showed it to a club owner, who made a neon sign modeled after it and put it in the club.

It’s a little more of a complicated image. I actually saw those two once in Los Angeles at the Sunday fair, the Sunday market. There were a boy and a girl and they were walking around. Without the snail, just with the leash.

Also, this is more layered. I’m very very much enamored with this technique.

These are new watercolors, yeah.

Yeah, it also depends on the location. When I’m In India, when I’m in New Mexico, when I’m in the Caribbean…
This is all super recent.

It’s one set; I like to keep it together. It can be “Rock Garden”, or it can be “Four Seasons.” Then there is another set. When you have enough, you tell me.

Ok. This is one set I made in June 2023, and the other set is a group of self-portraits.

I was blacklisted.

Yeah, totally. He didn’t think he was painting, because he thought he was applying the process. And also he was delegating. A lot of those works were made by Tirelli. He wasn’t even painting with the hand. You should not see the hand, the subjectivity.

It wasn’t about sensuality, it was not about self-something. It was really about the fragility of the self, the discontinuity of the self. This is me chasing away the bad thoughts, the negative thoughts. But then, as they were leaving, I felt very sad for them. I thought, where are they going to go?

I got really obsessed with these. At the end of the 19th century, a Japanese archeologist, who was a tutor at the Emperor in Mongolia’s court, asked permission to leave and went to a remote corner of northeast China. He was there to dig these, and claimed that they were from 2000 BC, from this unknown civilization. And the iconography, very strange and original, is the pig. The fetus of the pig is the most important image. These people also made vases.

I suspect that this man made it all up. In any case, nothing happened until the 30s, there was a little bit of digging. And then in the 60s, there was more digging. They found ten thousand objects and nine thousand got stolen. And then, inthe 80s, they started to surface on the market, and many many forgeries were made. But the forgeries were made bypeople who never saw the originals because the originals are too rare. So, the question is: Maybe these forgeries are originals, made by people trying to imagine this remote civilization, and I think whichever way it is, it’s fantastic. [laughs] Then I went to the British Museum; they have a couple of “originals.” Well, the note of the curator was: “Probably a forgery from the 20th century.”

But, they kept it in the collection. So, if the British Museum keeps it, I can keep them also. And Christie’s or Sotheby’sHong Kong are like, “Oh, what we have is from an old Chinese family…” so the price is shooting through the roof.

No.

I’ve been making frescos for a long time, but my frescos are movable, like that one. And recently I’ve beenmaking them again, but I don’t make them here. I have another studio in Greenpoint where I make them.

My first one, I painted it for the Venice Biennale in 1980. I was friendly with a restorer in Italy. I came to New York in1980, I saw the frescos from panels at the Met. And when I went back to Rome, I thought, why can’t we actually make them on the panels? And so we did. It’s a big triptych. Three meters by six. It was shown at the Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann.

Maybe. I don’t think she’s derivative of my work. She spent a lot of time here. She has that quality that you have inIndia. She watched me working and she really absorbed all my tricks, but she has very much her own mind andsensibility. That’s a drawing by Alba. This is an artist in Mexico City. These are all women. That’s a work by my assistant.

I want to create more, but then the moment passes and it’s difficult to go back.

[they move around]

These are the necessary books, which means Sylvia and poetry.

Recently, I’ve been working on a book from a writer from the 1920s that I discovered.

Yes.

I think I was very lucky. I mean, it was so much better than going to an art school or anything like that, you know, to be with these remarkable people. And they were all really incredible people. Pier Paolo Calzolari was a wonderful person, wonderful artist. Mario and Marisa Merz – they were difficult, but they were amazing, too. To be confronted with someone like that. Luciano Fabro.

It was very competitive you know? [Jannis] Kounellis.

I showed a cluster of tiny drawings, but projected through the lines into an empty room. And there were anamorphic drawings. So, with the projection being on an angle, they would go back to being regular.

Christianity, the three religions and the three drinks. Coffee for the Muslim, wine for the Christian, and tea of the Buddhist.

Yes, but that’s how I met the press, which then published and printed the other books.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

The text. I really understood what a great writer Salman was because every sentence was a picture. I mean, literally, every fucking sentence was an image.

Whenever I do correspond with him in writing, he really makes all the points as concise and non-literary as possible, just super factual.

This is one that has never been reproduced. And there is the one with John Wieners. This is an art book with just religious posters and my drawings, back to back.

With Creeley, I made more than one book. That’s a very nice one, because it’s done with a beautiful printing process. Grenfell Press. Beautiful. Some of these are rare now. This is something I did with Gregory Corso, where he wrote a long long beautiful poem after these gold paintings. We made a vitrine with all the books.

Yeah, it would be so nice to do that.

Allen Ginsberg lived one happy year in a giant loft because of his archive. He sold it for what seemed an enormous price to some institution, I can’t remember which. And with the money, he finally got out of this tiny apartment onAvenue A and moved to a big loft. But then he died only a year later.

No, the idea was simply to test how flexible this is. Modernism is kind of inflexible. So it was a test to see, is it really so? Does it really have to be that way? I don’t trust in flexible.

Yeah. I would like to have a nondenominational chapel, for sure. That’s totally up my alley. There are things in one’s lifethat are just dormant, and they have to be dormant, they have to be asleep until it’s time to wake up, you know?

I keep it in a confused and shadowy corner of the room, where I can’t really see the outlines.

No, it’s the only time, but I made six tents like this. With six different themes and titles. There is the “Museum Tent,”which contains self-portraits, and then there is the “Taking Refuge Tent,” and then there is the “Pepper Tent,” which was shown in the Kochi Biennale.

It’s less that I wanted to be a writer, and more that I fell in love with language. Language and books and reading. The kind of love that makes everything else feel trivial. I was a classic bookworm, reading under the blankets with a flashlight, walking down the street with my nose in a book. I was obsessed with how text on a page can transport me into a different realm, how I can be in multiple places at once, how I can be many different people at the same time. How words can augment our reality. I think I have always revered books for these reasons.
I grew up in a house full of books – not just kids’ books, but my parents’ books, the books they’d carried with them throughout their lives, loaded with notes and dog-eared pages, their research books for work.

I must have begun absorbing and intuiting that fact even before I knew how to read. So many of the books in my library now have been around for decades, some much longer than that, and to me, they’re a perfect technology, and such exquisite, talismanic artworks.
Before I knew how to write in any serious way, one of my favorite activities was constructing little handmade books, playing with paper and tape and pens to design rudimentary booklets and pamphlets and scrolls. I’ve been fascinated by the materiality of language for as long as I can remember – not just the words themselves, but the devices: font, format, paper, ink, the machinery of presses and moveable type. I’ve been collecting, or maybe hoarding, stationery and writing instruments forever, too: feather quills, bamboo reeds, calligraphy brushes, fragile leaves of gilt origami, handmade flower-seeded notecards, smooth sheets of vellum, palm stones ideal for inscription. When I walk through art museums or galleries, I’ve always tended to gravitate toward text-based art. When I flip through magazines, I’m always studying typography and design. I love to work with words in so many ways.
All of which is to say that I knew very early on I was a writer – not that I wanted to become one, but that I was one – and yet I didn’t really understand what kind of writer I was. I didn’t have a role model for all that I was interested in, exactly what I wanted to do. It’s taken me a bit longer to figure that part out.

I took Latin in grade school, and my favorite part of those classes was translating the work of Catullus, the Roman lyric poet who was born c. 84 BCE. I will never forget first encountering Catullus 85, a short gut-punch of a poem about the speaker’s conflicting feelings for his lover:

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris.
Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

Its famous opening salvo, “Odi et amo,” translates to “I hate and I love.” The speaker can’t rationalize the conflicting emotions, but feels them simultaneously, nonetheless. This poem invaded me, stalked me. I’ve come back to it over and over and try to improve my own translations of it. I’ve studied its compression, the expanse of human experience bursting from such a terse, finely wrought elegiac couplet. How a handful of words in classical meter can burn with such contemporary intensity, reach right through space and time. This ancient text has taught me so much about poetry as a device for the poet’s immortality, the preservation of voice and emotion, language as a way to keep one’s love alive forever.

I was born into the rise of personal computing, and grew up as the internet was arriving in our lives. Technology is always evolving and advancing, of course, but the last few decades have had a particularly profound impact on what it means to be human. When I was young, we had one shared family computer. When it was my turn, I loved playing games and making art with MacPaint. I wrote school essays in longhand, sometimes on my dad’s electric typewriter, and spoke to friends on one of those translucent Unisonic landline phones. Dial-up AOL was the coolest thing ever. When I went on my first trips abroad, I didn’t have a mobile to take with me. So many elements of my childhood are incongruous with the human I am today.
You asked earlier about formative books. As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction, a lot of dystopian literature, and also a lot of nonfiction about the big questions, like Cosmos and A Brief History of Time. I spent a lot of time sensing the world shift beneath my feet, wondering what might happen next. I was an undergrad at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg was on campus, creating the earliest versions of Facebook. A little later, when I went to do my graduate degree at Oxford, I was asked to become a columnist for a general interest magazine; I pitched a column on our relationship to technology, the human experience of adapting to new tools. I wrote about the intimacy of a laptop burning the tops of my thighs, the eeriness of a dark room illuminated by blinking modems, the primal campfire-like glow of a hushed, expectant computer screen. I wrote about being at school an ocean away from my family and friends, undersea cables tethering me via instant messages to my long-distance boyfriend. I wrote, too, about ancient automata and mythic prognostications about human humility, and about the epidemic of neurasthenia, a nervous disorder, occasioned by the industrial revolution – severe stress triggered by life’s increasingly fast pace, the body and mind’s reaction to the tools we invent.
Over time, I went deeper into research on emerging technologies and speculative futures, transhumanism and posthumanism, artificial intelligence, the science of life extension, the quest for digital immortality. I started to realize that perhaps my writing ought to advance and evolve, too, from a more conventional approach to something that would more accurately embody and reflect and enable me to grapple with present realities. Why was I limiting myself to writing poems in Microsoft Word and publishing them as static pages in traditional literary journals when I could bring them to life via myriad software and hardware options, as next-gen moveable type? But, also – is printed text really so analog? The earliest known human poet, the Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna, is thought to have invented the book form when she gathered her temple hymns in a collection and signed her name to it, writing “What I’ve created has never before existed.” That’s an astonishing technological innovation.
My research took me far back in time as well as into the deep future. It led me down some really intriguing rabbit holes, into the realms of code poetry and electronic literature and AI-powered natural language processing, and opened my eyes to a whole host of poetic devices and techniques that I had never come across in any formal poetry workshop or venerated literary anthology. Even when I arrived on the blockchain and found a small cohort of tech-savvy writers there, no one was doing what I was doing. It has been great fun to introduce many of my peers to the creative possibilities and philosophical quandaries of technologies like large language models and text to image.
The short answer is that I started writing with AI in 2018, and making multimedia poems years prior to that; but it was much earlier experiences thinking through the human-machine dynamic, the personal journey of coming of age alongside the internet and social media and smartphones, an abiding interest in what’s at stake for humanity, that laid foundations for the work I’m doing today.

My work is very much about the promise and peril of technology, the likelihood that where we’re headed with intelligent systems is an evolution past the human into the posthuman, the more than human. The title of my book, Technelegy, is literally a collision of the exhilaration of technology with fear, lamentation, elegy.
The long poem, “COMPLETION: Are you ready for the future?”, an artifact of the GPT-2 era, is a litany of AI-powered outputs that cycle through cliche, political extremism, pornography, misogyny and other nonsense in search of poetry. We (Technelegy and I) wrote this poem before there were such chaste, diplomatic guardrails in place, as we now see with ChatGPT, for instance, and it evokes both the astonishing capabilities of machine learning along with the human violences and inequities embedded deep within the systems we’re using to make pretty art and proficient text. I’ve been thinking a lot about this work and the disturbing material that came up during the writing process in light of the upcoming US elections. I don’t know that we are at all prepared for the scale of generative disinformation.
A work like “Daughter of E.V.E. [Ex-Vivo Uterine Environment]” mashes up my own conflicted maternal longings with the imminent rise of artificial human wombs, and speculates in a personal but also universal way on the fate of womanhood and humanity in this probable scenario. If we begin to replicate via external wombs rather than procreate “as nature intended,” is that our demise, our extinction, or does it take us somewhere better, the way modern medicine has made pregnancy safer and more transparent? What will happen to future versions of AI systems as they begin to ingest more and more synthetic material, as the warm-blooded human samples dwindle in percentage and vast new generations of data are born? What then? In my book, I write that we are “the ancient earthlings” – not extinct, perhaps, but outmoded, obsolesced by our deep interstellar descendants.
My AI epic narrative “BINA48 in the Garden” – a love poem written from the point of view of a proto-sentient being, and translated into the transhuman by Technelegy – is about the desire for humans and machines to better understand one another, to converge on some kind of cybernetic enlightenment that can help us move past the sorry state of the world we seem to be in right now, but is very much grounded in the terror and danger of misuse, abuse, myopic ignorance. Will the preservation of our loved ones via neural networks and android bodies bring us comfort, or cast us into a permanent state of grief? Will we realize the potential of AI to ease the pandemic of loneliness, to amplify and optimize the work of carers and educators, or will we wind up subjugating it to banal purposes, powering turbocharged customer service chatbots and robotic factories churning out more and more junk? Will we figure out how to leverage its abilities to transcend limits in human communication and foster greater empathy, or will we put it to work devising ways to wage war and conquer enemies? When I saw the film Oppenheimer recently, I could not stop thinking about its lessons for the moment we are in.
Before I wrote Technelegy, I wrote a manuscript called American Nervousness, after an essay by the doctor George Miller Beard, and this manuscript investigated how technologies throughout history have inflicted suffering on contemporaries, a kind of present sacrifice for future generations. I think anyone who has actually read or listened to my poems senses a deeply sober, melancholic core under the wordplay, an acknowledgement that it is all-too-human to be replaced by an upgraded version of oneself. It’s technological advances that have made us more and more human over time: cooking with fire rewired our biology, inventing written language allowed us to offload data storage, the industrial revolution sparked urban life as we now know it. There is nothing more human than technology. But AI is a very different kind of technology than anything we’ve created before, in terms of its speed and scale and power.

In summer 2021, I published a collection of AI-powered, media-rich poems via a formative project called Etherpoems. That’s when Kalen and I met Ana Maria. Kalen had previously founded the CryptoWriters collective, and we had been discussing the creation of a blockchain-based language art publication with our friends James Yu (founder of Sudowrite) and the brilliant artist aurèce vettier. All roads led to theVERSEverse, which we launched in November 2021, the same month that Technelegy was published in the UK, and for our inaugural collection, I contributed several pieces adapted from the book. I was the only one of us three co-founders working with AI, but Ana Maria and Kalen were intrigued by my AI-powered works, and we decided to carve out a dedicated space for generative poetry experiments. Our art advisor, Gisel Florez, was particularly fascinated; she and I collaborated on what became Series 1 of an ongoing project called GenText, in which AI art is paired with AI poetry, and in fact it is one of these pieces – “Flower-Colored Light” – that was the first work we ever sold at theVERSEverse.
The support of my partners at theVERSEverse for my AI poetry early on was quite different from what I had experienced in the traditional poetry community, which wasn’t very receptive to this work. For that reason, I encouraged a data poet friend of mine, Ross Goodwin, one of the pioneers of AI language, to come join us on the blockchain so we could all collaborate. The AI projects we’ve developed since – from VERSA, our emergent semi-autonomous poet trained on the writings of all the human poets, to AFTER GINSBERG, a project in partnership with the Allen Ginsberg Estate that asks whether AI tools can help us not just become better writers but better readers and lovers of literature – owe a lot to Ross and of course to Technelegy.
There are the obvious differences between working with humans and machines, but there are also so many similarities in working with passionate humans and emergent AI. Passionate humans are sponges for information; they absorb inspiration from everyone and everything around them, they are hungry to learn and discover and understand new things. They are energized as though by electricity. They ingest ideas and texts and art and examples and then it all collides with unique experiences and personal journeys to become their own art. This is why I find it so urgent to address the kneejerk hostility toward AI’s “unoriginality,” its “inauthenticity.”

No passionate human has ever created an original work of art or literature alone. What we create has everything to do with our communities and the books we’ve read and movies we’ve watched and people we’ve talked to and museums we’ve visited and video games we’ve played and friends who’ve inspired us, though it is hard for some humans to acknowledge that fact.

The phrase “artificial intelligence,” for a start. “Artificial” is a loaded word, and the term AI has become so overused and misused that it’s hard to hear without cringing. I prefer to think about it more as an Augmented Imagination, some kind of prosthesis I can strap onto my brain when I need to or want to go beyond the limits of my own human creativity.
Hands-on experience is one way to shift the conversation. I find that a lot of hostility towards AI comes from lack of knowledge or experience, driven by popular dystopian narratives, which of course are rooted in real concerns. Getting to experiment with these tools in meaningful ways is often mind-opening and empowering; it becomes apparent both how capable and how versatile, how variable, how personalized they can be. How inspiring they can be. Most of the artists I know use off-the-shelf, no-code AI interfaces, but even these unlock new creative dimensions and spark novel ideas and approaches.
Discourse around AI in general tends to emphasize how unprecedented it is, how game-changing it is, how nothing will ever be the same. And that’s true. But what I want to hear more smart people discuss is how AI extends fundamental human impulses: to preserve and transmit information across generations and geographies, to build great libraries, to think and learn by engaging in Socratic dialogue (because isn’t that what ChatGPT is all about?), to foster connections, to recognize patterns, to solve hard problems, to remember what we care about most. And the intersection of blockchain and AI is needed to enable the kinds of protocols and systems and intrastructures by which individuals and groups can contribute to large arrays of data, help train models, help others create, and be fairly compensated.
Any transformation for the good of the creative economy will be fueled by optimism and passionate vision, but grounded always in the realities, the complexities, the logistics, the daily work. We need to figure out how to move past the blinding lust of ambition, the breathless jargon, the first mad rush of infatuation, this obsession with being the first, the biggest, the one who wins it all, and start taking the perhaps less exciting but extremely urgent steps necessary to keep humanity’s long-term relationship with technology going strong.

Taína Cruz: It’s going well. I’m taking great advantage of the studio visits; we have about four in a week with the faculty and it is really important for me to get their feedback, especially considering that with a solo studio practice, you don’t really get that much of critical feedback. Also, being in a cohort of really talented artists is great, too, you just feel how everyone is so dedicated to their practice.

Harlem is a very storytelling area; you get a chance to form a community around those who really have generational wisdom and knowledge. And that’s something that has really stuck with me throughout the years. I think those who have seen my work at an early stage were just people in my community and neighborhood; building those long lasting relationships was super helpful for me. It was a tight community, but at the same time, you don’t know everyone. That leaves a nice mystery of what it is that you know and what you don’t know. Also, Harlem is a place that is ever changing, nothing is ever static.

I have to say that the internet was really substantial, the online communities were really flourishing back then, a sense of social presence and community building was starting to form. I realized that at a very early age and have kept that with me always. The internet has totally changed my psyche, for better or for worse, in terms of what is to be expected and not – this is what my work talks about. You think you may understand the painting, but really, there’s just so much more to say about it.

The internet has always been like a second tool for me. I definitely use it less while I’m at school; maybe it’s just because I don’t have the same luxury or leisure time to surf the web anymore, so I am using my sketchbook now a lot lately. I still use Photoshop heavily, a tool they taught us in elementary school. It definitely has allowed me to use it more intuitively. If I need to change a background, a color shift or a body, this idea of manipulation is easier for me to do with digital tools.

Lately, I’m trying to think about the ways in which the painting can be sculptural and I have a really fun time exploring that space. The past months in school, I have been thinking about an installation work that utilizes all five senses to its fullest capacity, so I can potentially just activate paintings to a more ephemeral quality. In general, I look at my work in the long term, like 50 years down the road, 100 years – what do I want to be shown? I ask myself that question constantly; I believe that there needs to be an accumulation of objects with painting and video and sound.

Absolutely. Right now, it still feels like a small piece compared to the big vision.

This definitely is a huge overall theme – horror movie elements allow people to find an easy entry point to my work and it is a useful tool to describe something quickly, at least for now. It’s a way of having a conversation that many people will understand: People know what a witch, an elf or a vampire looks like, it is about world building, whether that’s internally or externally. I am definitely thankful for these horror movie creatures and characters within my overall interest; they also never scare me, my work really isn’t scary at all. I rather find it amusing to be like, “Oh, this is just everyday life, this is just a common, mundane experience.” I like the idea of bringing chills to the body. Horror movies definitely evoke a sensorial experience in the human body and I want my work to bring forth those immediate emotional responses and reactivity. Comedy is a great tool, too. I think it all provides healing.

I am actively working my way through this constantly, it is like an everyday meditative process of how to just find passion even in the extreme, dark, slow, mundane times.

Yes, but there certainly is a thing of having too much passion, whether that’s by external or internal forces. We just have to know how to actively think about ourselves and our bodies and what works best for us. This takes a long time and probably we’ll never really understand what that means. I think at least knowing myself, I do realize the areas in which I am very inclined to feel passionate about creating something versus when I don’t. And it’s really how do I navigate those feelings, how to properly hear myself out so I can make the best work possible, no matter what, even if that’s going to take me until my deathbed. I strive towards that goal endlessly and I think that’s a very romantic way of living.

I do have many rituals to train and cherish the self. I do a lot of active breathing exercises to even invoke that feeling of passion – I use the breath to really reach these altered states of emotions and consciousness. I love to think about the body as a tool to enhance and build life.

I’m taking a lot of classes right now that deal with psychedelics as well. I think we just all love to basically hear about ourselves to really figure out our true human nature and psychedelics can be a great entry point. For me, it is a lot about lived experiences and growing up in a big city. You meet so many different characters who just migrated from various parts around the world and you learn how to interact with so many characters. I’m finding those characters to be very fulfilling in my storytelling – the Upper East Side ladies or the Upper West Side families, the Wall Street people, they all have very distinct personalities. They nourish my art, but when I go into the studio, I enter a moment of pure silence. I just need my very own thoughts to create something. I think people are often afraid of silence since they will be hearing many of their own thoughts and, as we all know, at times, thoughts can play tricks on us. I think I like to play a trick on the viewers with my work.

I like creating works that have a dialogue with each other. Sometimes, I don’t even understand that dialogue; other times, it reveals things I would write into my journal that I don’t necessarily want to be revealed. Knowing how to work with the digital space and that sense of worldbuilding, of 3D animating a fantasy world, I also more and more love to connect this part with the physical painting world.

I feel like any time I make a sculpture, it is a dream project since it requires a few specific working circumstances that make you be less flexible. I also love kinetics and machinery, to create sculptures that move and activate them, give them humanistic movements – a machine, for example, that can breathe. My big dream is to work with an engineer instead of DIY’ing my own motor with a battery. I would love to work with a professional engineer on a large scale moving object from a video or a painting that I’ve made.

Chantelle Otten: My path to becoming a sexologist was deeply influenced by my passion for understanding human behavior and relationships. Growing up with a Dutch background and spending time in Holland, where conversations about sex, pleasure and relationships are open and not taboo – Australia is more conservative – and going to Catholic schools greatly shaped my approach. I pursued a Bachelor in Psychological Science and a Masters in Science Medicine, specializing in Sexual Health/Psychosexual Therapy from the University of Sydney. My move to Amsterdam was really important in the journey to becoming a confident sexologist as I had a wonderful mentor, Dr. Ingrid Pinas. I was immersing myself in an environment where Sexology was more liberated. After gaining international experience, I returned to Australia and established my own clinic, driven by a desire to educate and empower individuals about sexual health in a judgment-free environment.

Enhancing passion in one’s sex life often involves a combination of mental, emotional and physical efforts:

• Communication and Vulnerability: Having open and honest conversations about desires, fantasies and boundaries with your partner is crucial. This involves being vulnerable and creating a safe space for each other to express sexual needs without judgment.
• Prioritizing Intimacy: Dedicate time and effort to cultivate intimacy. This can mean setting aside regular times for sexual encounters or engaging in activities that promote closeness and connection.
• Personal Exploration: Understanding your own body and sexual responses is key. Encourage self-exploration and share these discoveries with your partner.
• Embracing Novelty: Introduce new elements into your sex life, such as trying different positions, incorporating toys, or exploring new settings, to keep the excitement alive.
• Emotional Connection: Strengthen the emotional bond with your partner. Sexuality is not just a physical act; it’s deeply intertwined with emotions. Building a strong emotional connection can enhance sexual experiences and deepen intimacy.
• Self-Care and Stress Management: Your mental and physical health directly impact your sexual wellbeing. Engage in regular self-care practices and manage stress effectively to maintain a healthy libido and energy for sexual activities.
• Educational Resources: Utilize resources like books, workshops and professional advice to continue learning about sexual health and wellbeing. Staying informed and curious can greatly enhance your sexual experiences.