Tony Hope. Untitled (Hugh), 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and ASHES/ASHES.

Installed within the gallery’s bathroom, Untitled (Dawn) (2015) exists as a completely formalized staging of a rustic bathroom filled with the aesthetic of family values: duck replicas, wicker wreaths, and the words “family” and “friends” hung around a collaged photo wall. The installation falls in steep contrast to the spatially barren exhibition within the gallery’s main space. Whereas Untitled (Dawn) infers a claustrophobic reminder of unrealistic, unbridled acceptance based on family collectivity, Untitled (Living Room) reveals the opposition: a stark wasteland of solo identities appropriated and later discarded. The two create a dichotomy, allowing for an assessment of one against the other, while finally arriving at the same far ends of fanaticism.

In the main gallery, the viewer is introduced to a series of sculptural works relating to Hope’s past cultural allegiances. Only open during evening hours, the installation is experienced in the dark, with the sole sources of illumination emanating from two works: Untitled (Living Room) (2015), an ambient green glow that peers through the gallery’s vertical blinds from outside the gallery, and Untitled (Journeys) (2015), a single monitor, playing music videos on loop, that faces a wall and produces an inconsistent haze. These two works provide an immediate environmental context for a viewer to access time as a static placeholder in a seemingly abandoned space.

Tony Hope. Untitled (Living Room), 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and ASHES/ASHES.

The core elements of Hope’s sculptures are residual constructs of highly marketed media material from mid ’90s horror-core and industrial bands like Insane Clown Posse and KMFDM. Installed sparsely on the wall, Untitled (T-Shirts) (2015) is made from a selection of largely destroyed T-shirts that Hope once wore while attending shows. The shirts are individually sealed with Mod Podge and are transformed into artifacts symbolic of earned identity. Once a well-worn stand-in for self expression, the shirts are now inactive sculptural relics that exist alone within memory and time.

Similarly, Hope’s video installation Untitled (Journeys) plays a loop of promotional commercials and music videos from the mid ’90s that were originally selected to play in the suburban alt-cult store Journeys. By facing the monitor toward the wall, Hope creates an empty, dead feeling where angst and energy once existed.

Many of the tactical details within the installation admit Hope’s intimacy as part of the audience he is referencing. Untitled (Patriots) (2015) exists as two red and blue bands crossing the perimeter of the gallery, alluding to Hope’s high-school hallways. Likewise, the T-shirts in Untitled (T-Shirts) are from Hope’s personal collection, and the video loop of Untitled (Journeys) references Hope’s time working at the suburban mall chain. In this way the entire exhibition can be viewed as completely personal to Hope’s own trajectory, as the references are direct from his life, yet the cultural monikers are broad enough to account for a collective understanding.

Tony Hope. Untitled (T-Shirts), 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and ASHES/ASHES.

Hope’s most direct comment on being part of an audience in your own life is perhaps best seen with Untitled (Hugh) (2015), a sculpture of a severed head on a metal stake that rests on the base of a low platform. A reference from a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode titled I, Borg, this work is a replica of a reprogrammed Borg who takes on a new identity as an individual named Hugh, attempting to leave behind the collective hive mind of the Borg. The philosophical inquiry is centered on the challenge of individual choice versus group collectivity as it pertains to identity. Fear is a motivator in attempting the new identity as Hugh, as well as in reverting back to a nameless Borg in the end.

As a whole, TH+ visually explores ways of coping, while both installations address the tension between the individual and the collective. By highlighting the contrast within the two installations, Hope engages the inevitable failure of such coping mechanisms when used as a source of identity.

Tony Hope: TH+ is on view at ASHES/ASHES in Los Angeles through December 30, 2015.

Meow Wolf. Moving Still, 2014; Room 1 Installation View. Courtesy of the Front. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa.

In a collective, there is an essential dissolving of the individual in order to be part of the shared experience. One of the benefits of this dissolution is the creation of a group culture—and a group memory. Meow Wolf explores their history in the first two rooms of the Front. A timeline reveals important moments in the collective’s past, and short texts are interconnected by dark gray lines. For example, there is the creation story of Meow Wolf: “Birthed from previous social and creative incarnation (Meg’s house, Warehouse 21, The Quadraplex) Meow Wolf comes into being on the night of February 1st, 2008. 10 people attended the first meeting, discussed splitting the cost of the space on 2nd Street, and chose the name ‘Meow Wolf’ by pulling it randomly out of a hat.” While these texts are interesting—especially when Meow Wolf explores the fractures and failures of working in a group context—at times the two rooms become overly nostalgic and didactic. Videos projected onto the wall show past installations, and mementos from different members are placed throughout the room. The timeline ends with a short text stating that Nucleotide (2013) was the last group installation with David Loughridge, a member who died tragically in 2013.

Meow Wolf. Moving Still, 2014; Room 3 Installation View. Courtesy of the Front. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa.

Moving into the back half of this exhibit, one passes into a different world, a spiritual, delirious space that memorializes the death and births of members of the group. In the middle of the room, smoke plumes up from a machine inside of a shrine, surrounded by flowers, candles, and personal artifacts. Atmospheric sounds denote a change into a more ethereal space. Mirrors reflect a strong light that emanates from below the smoke; the light forms rectangular shapes on the wall that hold memorials to David Loughridge and commemorations of the birth of Golda Blaise’s new child in 2014. Like a dark, gothic church filled with chants, this shrine to birth and death creates deep-welling emotions in the visitor.

Meow Wolf. Moving Still, 2014; Room 4 Installation View. Courtesy of the Front. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa.

The final room at the Front is a continuation of the previous dream, as boards of old wood are stapled together in lattice-like form with neon-colored lights projected through random areas. Artworks from some of the members not present for this installation are placed here, but they seem an afterthought to the immersive, sensorial framework of the space.

Meow Wolf. Moving Still, 2014; Room 1 Installation View. Courtesy of the Front. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa.

One of the benefits of working in an arts collective is that each member of the group contributes to a shared history, one that lasts longer than an individual’s imperfect recollection. While I never had the pleasure to meet Loughridge, the Meow Wolf memorial has allowed his work and life to persist—and to commingle with the birth of new lives—in a sort of reincarnation. If we accept this shared history as a form of immortality, one that can pass down through generations, then Meow Wolf has given itself a great gift in Moving Still.

LUXUS. Tu Wolno Kochać Się, 2013; mixed media, LUXUS Magazine; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

Encoding actual protest actions, the Orange Alternative sought to turn resistance into a symbolic narrative and thereby circumvent the communist regime’s policing and military countermeasures. It confronted the political situation head on, and in this way, it differentiates itself from LUXUS. The latter continues to virtualize a kind of reactionary reality against the failures of the state and of ideology and against the avant-garde. It operated in opposition to existing art movements such as Conceptualism and Abstract Expressionism—somewhat belated arrivals to the Eastern Bloc perhaps—but also became an early vehicle of capitalist critique in a place where capitalist activity was still limited.

Jerzy Kosałka. Instalacja wodno-elektryczna (Hydro-electric Installation), 1993; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

Under the weight of its historical context, the LUXUS collective is currently involved in a multipart exhibition inside a massive air-raid bunker. The towering concrete cylinder is now home, albeit temporarily, to the Wrocław Contemporary Museum and is the site of a collection of LUXUS artifacts. The LUXUS Magazine exhibition serves as an archive housed inside the safety of the museum and is poised for some potential, not-so-theoretical future crisis.

LUXUS artists have risen out of a Western fantasy of wealth to use whatever is available. With a significant focus on the temporary and provisional, they create crudely printed posters, street art, found object sculptures, and installations. They appropriate commercial productions and generate performances. The reality of having operated under the state’s watchful eye imparts a need for the ephemeral and a readiness to be unmade, broken down, and withdrawn. These aesthetics are particularly evident in the low-brow posters that line the curved bunker walls, an installation of crude cardboard buildings, and the spacial intervention that reads “tu wolno kochać się” (making love allowed here). Even souvenirs in the form of printed matchboxes are available for the taking, a reference to the Solidarity’s strategy of disseminating information in similarly altered matchboxes.

Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka. Cancer, Szablon, (Edycja na Zapałkach) (Stencil, Matchbox Edition), 2013; mixed media; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

Meanwhile, LUXUS artists Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka and Ewa Ciepielewska’s highly saturated and vivid paintings blend pop-culture idols and spiritual icons into a kind of inebriated haze. The use of color in these works serves as evidence of an indulgence in various substances,  a LUXUS tradition and an open secret, but it also speaks to the delirium of capitalist production. Such chromatic echoes continue in A Cat with a Stupid Facial Expression—a key visual element in the group’s identity. Based on a mass-produced cat toy, the image is repeated ad nauseum in various iterations. Its repetition reiterates a societal inundation with kitsch and conflates the Polish fascination with icons of both capitalist and religious origin.

LUXUS. 2013; installation view, LUXUS Magazine; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

The whole experience of walking through this museum bunker and the LUXUS Magazine exhibition gave me a sentiment of futility. Bamboo frameworks and manufactured detritus encroach upon the stairways and passages, making for a claustrophobic environment. Simultaneously, artist Patrycja Mastej’s installation on the second floor covers the walls in a panorama of the surrounding neighborhood and is littered with cutouts of presumed luxury goods. Titled Szczepin in the Icing of Luxus (2013), Mastej’s piece—made interactive by allowing participants to reconfigure the cutouts—reinforced the sense of futility I felt in light of these masses of kitsch.

Patrycja Mastej, Szczepin in the Icing of Luxus, 2013 (detail); mixed media. Photo: Michal Wisniowski

An unspecified member of LUXUS is quoted in the museum’s guide saying, “We create independently a world for ourselves, a world where we would like to live; our own magazines, our own music and films.” Insofar as such creation maintains a level of critical self-awareness, it exists as social practice. But what happens if the line between practice and reinforcement becomes blurry? Such modes of production may have been more radical in the past, but are these modes of artistic production still distinguishable from present commercial production? LUXUS takes mass-produced goods and their conventions into a realm that is nauseatingly effective. Kitsch is transformed and regurgitated into hyper-kitsch.

Jerzy Kosałka. Dama bez łasiczki (Lady Without an Ermine), 2004; mixed media. Photo: Michal Wisniowski

One room houses a dimly lit banquet table littered with fantastical concoctions from end to end. The everyday is contorted into the grotesque, and an opulent, synthetic feast is born. Everything is glazed, sticky, and toxic. At the end of the room hangs a simulation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famed Lady with an Ermine (1489–90), but the creature has escaped the confines of its canvas. Perched upon the painting’s frame, it sits in a moment of terminal irony, a specimen of bad taxidermy.

LUXUS Magazine is on view at Wrocław Contemporary Museum / Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław through September 2, 2013.

"Shoemaker's Dialogues" at the Guggenheim, New York. 2011.

Allie Haeusslein: Perhaps the best way to contextualize the projects we will discuss is to talk a bit about the birth Futurefarmers. Can you identify some of the key issues or influences that sparked the creation of the collective?

Amy Franceschini: It wasn’t something that was created, which I think is important; it sort of became – and it is always becoming. But it really came out of a design studio in the 1990s, in which I was doing design work. At that time, I had to start collaborating with lots of different kinds of people – programmers, engineers, copywriters, photo editors, and researchers. So, the studio became filled with all of these different thinkers who were sharing the space. That ethos of collaboration was really exciting. And then, we started to get asked to do art projects by museums. I wanted to keep that multidisciplinary ethos going.

AH: The collaborative spirit you’ve described really seems evident in your project at the Guggenheim this past March. Can you describe the genesis of this project and how you feel it responds specifically to the New York City environment?

AF: The exhibition was part of a new series called Intervals, which is supposed to show artists who’ve never had a solo show in NYC. They ask artists to respond to the building in a way that it hasn’t been used before and for the exhibitions to be short.

When we went there, we were like “what do we do at the Frank Lloyd Wright museum in terms of speaking to the building? And what do we say in New York? What do we say on this stage that has such a spotlight on it?” What we felt in our several site visits was that Manhattan, specifically, has changed so much over the years. We felt like the soul of it had gone, like that thing of New York wasn’t as strong as it had been before. Maybe it’s out in the other boroughs, but Manhattan is starting to feel like a caricature of itself. How do we respond to that? That was part of the starting point.

Conceptual sketch for "Soil Kitchen." Drawing by Dan Allende.

We found this story about Socrates going to visit a shoemaker named Simon outside of the Agora. Socrates was involved in the politics of the Agora and was fed up with it and wanted to find people who were thinking in a way that wasn’t about power and control, but more about questions and wonder. We wanted to recreate the situation of Simon and Socrates meeting and it all just kind of fell into place. We had this idea of remaking a cobbler’s studio. There’s this curved bench in the bottom of the rotunda in the museum – its a place that is still free. Something that we always try to do is find a place where people don’t have to pay entry fee so that you get a diverse audience. We proposed to extend that bench and turn it into a cobbler’s bench and frame the sitting area on the bottom floor and turn it into a cobbler’s studio. That was our base for several excursions we did with different types of thinkers who we asked to respond to the story we found about Socrates and Simon. We met in 6 different places around the city. And then, we did a book called Soul/Sole Sermons that went along with the project that is printed in soot ink. Part of the project was to go on an excursion and collect soot from all these different boroughs in the New York area and make ink out if it. And we created a pair of shoes that had letters on them and printed texts commissioned by three writers in both the streets of New York and in a book.

AH: This idea of collecting earth or something of the place seems to be a recurrent theme in your work. I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about this idea and how it fits in with your recent project in Philadelphia, Soil Kitchen.

Select photographs from "This is Not a Trojan Horse," 2010.

AF: We all fetishize history, and maybe lost histories or unidentified histories. I think that the earth is the greatest archive. The landscape is an archive. With the case of Soil Kitchen and the soil sampling shoes and the soot collection in New York it’s about collecting this matter that has a lot of information in it that maybe we can’t see at first glance. But if you take it into a lab and get it tested or examined, there is quite a lot of information in there.

With Soil Kitchen, the specific context there was really exciting. The city of Philadelphia called and said “we want to be the greenest city by 2015 and we want to commission a work from you that happens during the Environmental Protection Agency Brownfield Conference.” We proposed to take over an abandoned building and open up a soup kitchen for the duration of the conference and ask people to bring in their soil samples in exchange for free soup. The Environmental Protection Agency had their labs there and did testing on the spot, which is really rare. The scientists tested it and then consulted with each person. That was the hi-tech soil science. Then, we had students from two different universities doing more of a nutritional test to see if there were contaminants in the soil; 80% of the soil was not contaminated. This secondary test was a really beautiful test where these scientists got people excited about soil. They did tests where they would put different volumes of water into soil and then the soil would separate into different substrates and you would realize “the soil I have has 8 different kinds of rock and silt and clay in it” and you could see it separate in front of your eyes.

AH: I think this connection to place also plays into This is Not a Trojan Horse, which considers the fate of traditional farming given the modernization of agriculture in the Abruzzo region of Italy. What drew you to this region in particular and to the “Trojan Horse” as a point of departure for this project?

AF: That project was inspired by Cooley Windsor’s story called “Epios, A Sculptor,” a story about the architect of the Trojan Horse and this imagining of what that sculptor thought when he was commissioned to make the Trojan Horse. Cooley’s story was always sitting in the back of our minds. We were asked to do a project in Italy as part of a residency program on a farm where the person who runs the residency, Gaetano, wants to revive his grandfather’s farm. He is bringing artists there to regenerate an excitement on the farm and in the region about farming because local youth are leaving in herds to go to the city.

Amy Franceschini, Michael Swaine & Ignacio Valero. Selected photograph from "A Variation on the Powers of Ten," February 17, 2011.

So we built this horse and went to 12 different villages and farms. We used the horse as a symbol of a time passed and a projection of the future. In this region 20 years ago, there were still wild horses running. So the horse is a very familiar icon. To scale it up and have it human powered was a spectacular invitation to engage with it. We just showed up in villages and didn’t know if it was going to work. At first, we’d sometimes go to a village with a maximum of 100 people and go in front of the church. And people would just look at us like we were freaks. But then the kids would come up and start engaging in the horse because you could run in it. That would invite the older population to come. It gave people a way to think about the future of that region and of farming. Many people kept saying, “this is a gift. We’ve actually stopped imagining what the future of farming is here because what we see is so dire.” So it gave people a platform. Inside the wheels of the horse was blackboard paint. We asked people to write down their ideas of the future of farming. And we interviewed different people about their memories of farming. As we would roll into the next village, those statements from the previous village would be presented to the next village. I think that that project was inspiring because it was outside of a museum context and it didn’t have the same pressure. We were fortunate that this man commissioned the project with such open-ended expectations.

AH: So what is next for Futurefarmers?

AF: One of our recent projects, A Variation on the Powers of Ten, is continuing on. It will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012 and in Sweden, at a museum called the Bildmuseet. And we’re working on a public art project in Norway that we’re still trying to figure out. It’s a really long public art project – four to six years long. So we have a lot to think about.