Shot Through the Heart, 2006. Glass and rum.
Olujimi's work has previsouly been included in exhibitions such as Reflections in Black, Smithsonian Museum, Open House, Brooklyn Museum; Bay Area Now 4, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and Frequency, Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2006 he had his first solo exhibition, Walk the Plank at Gallery 138, New York.
Olujimi confessed to having a "sweet jaw" as opposed to a sweet tooth and we quickly bonded talking sweet potato cake, Nutter Butters, Chunky Monkey and the new Chelsea joint Burgers and Cupcakes. Unfortunately, time and locale couldn't fulfill Kambui's final confectionery wish - Italian cheesecake or cream puffs. Part two of this conversation promises to be sickeningly sweet.
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Contemporary Confections: Is that real liquor in Shot Through the Heart?
Kambui Olujimi: Smell it.
CC: Mmm, smells good actually. Why clear Bacardi in this installation as opposed to the colored liquor you used previously?
KO: I think the difference between this space and the space where it was shown before is that there's a lot less happening. It's a white wall...and it’s not competing. I like the invisibility of it [in this setting]; the idea of it being something that you can just walk by. I think that's what this piece is about, about how addiction, this kind of addiction, is very invisible.
CC: Did this work come from a personal place?
KO: [The saying goes], "You know you're in the ghetto when there is a church and a liquor store on every corner." On the block that I live on there are four corners and there are literally two churches [and two liquor stores]. Then you go around the corner and you have two more churches, two more liquor stores.
CC: And where do you live?
KO: Bed-Stuy. That is where I grew up too. And [there] that saying is not even questionable. [Laughs]
CC: Why have you stayed in Bed-Stuy? Have you never thought about leaving?
KO: I actually go away and come back, go away and come back. I lived in Germany, Baltimore, Boston, and upstate New York. I came back to the block just because it's home. Though, I think it's important also to leave your crib, to leave where you grow up. It gives you a greater appreciation for what you've got and also it gives you an idea of what’s in the world.
I Never Sleep 'Cause Sleep Be the Cousin of Death, 2002. Mixed media.
CC: Talk to me about the piece I Never Sleep.
KO: I’m glad they showed this piece. This is from a series called Soliloquy, which is a series of digital collages that are based off of hip-hop lyrics. It was the idea of taking lyrics out of their context. There is a certain amount of forgetfulness - we have songs on the radio and we have edited versions and we play them in malls and we bop our heads, but nobody knows what the lyrics are. They are big overseas and still nobody knows what the lyrics are.
It was just interesting that hip-hop went from this subversive way for people to express themselves, people who felt like they weren't getting a voice to [finally getting] this extremely loud voice that no one pays attention to...So I was trying to use that language. A lot of my work is about using the language of a system to talk about that particular system.
Collage, much like hip-hop, is about sampling; it's about assemblage and taking all these different parts and putting it together to make something new. So I took different photographs from magazines, fashion magazines, National Geographic, to Lucky Lady [seen in the bottom right corner]. Lucky Lady is a dream book that tells you if you dream about alligators, then this is what that means, or these are your lucky numbers so you should play these numbers.
[Laughs] I used the numbers with this title/quote from...oh god, what song is that…New York State of Mind or Halftime? I think its from Halftime [by Nas]. It's this idea that sleep is like actual rest, but also there is just unawareness, like sleeping on people. I wanted to collapse this space between different kinds of poverty and how we spend our money on shit we don't need by the boatloads.
Gambling is a kind of false hope for a lot of people. Everyday they could win, and that is enough. So they'll pay a dollar or pay five dollars they don't really have, or in this day and age, twenty dollars, so that they can get a shot at something. I sort of wanted to marry those kinds of things.
CC: People playing numbers and gambling -- I'll stand in a line five people back at the corner store and everybody is playing numbers. You just know that some of these folks probably can't afford to be playing numbers and scraped together their last for slim chances at enormous wealth. It's kind crazy, but I guess that's what hope is about: taking chances.
KO: And then there are the illegal numbers. You wait in line but you can't really play there, you have to go to your barbershop, or your grocery store and you got to see somebody in the back of the laundry mat.
CC: So how did you come to be in this show? Was it through an art consultant?
KO: Well, they have two curators: Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Amy Smith-Stewart. Amy and I met before -- she used to curate at PS1. We hadd hoped to work together, so she called and asked me to come out and play on this project.
CC: And you're right next to your friend...
KO: Yeah. It's funny that they put Hank [Willis Thomas] and I right next to each other.
CC: You guys didn't have anything to do with it?
KO: No, but both curators know us. I don't think it's surprising.
CC: So, you also do curatorial work?
KO: Yeah. I did a show in 2003 called Off the Record...
CC: At Skylight Gallery?
KO: Yeah! I was really excited about the results. People just showed a lot of love on that. Pepon Osorio came out for that...Deborah Willis, Wangechi [Mutu], Nayland Blake. It was like being a kid in a candy store.
The concept of the show was to examine the fluidity of history, and basically this notion that history is not about the facts. It's described and articulated by its heroes, and those heroes are the carriers of a belief system, and that's really what it's about.
You look at George Washington, and he chops down his pop's cherry tree. It's not about whether or not he did it or didn't do it. It's not whether or not his father gets mad, or whatever. It's the fact that he said, "I can't tell a lie, " and the fact that he is remembered as an honest man because of that. And as our hero, we are honest people.
So I was interested in types of heroes...so the artists created their own heroes and made memorials for them. I wanted to see what kind of belief system they would make, what was important to them as a contemporary arts community. Each one could decide who their hero was and what the memorial was.
So it was, in my opinion, robust. Some people went very futuristic...well, it had to be in the future. Some people went really far into the future, some people went a day in the future, and some people went to an undescribed future.
CC: Who was Nayland Blake's hero?
KO: The rabbit character that he's always using...and it was about 'teaching mischief'. It was fun. Marc Robinson did a piece about this idea of the 'multitude'...the piece that he did, from far away, looked like a cliff that dropped out into a canyon. When you got up close though, it was made of small drawings of people falling over each other into this giant canyon.
CC: Oh!
KO: And it was ten feet!
CC: Do you plan to continue curating and working as an artist?
KO: Yeah, there are a couple projects that I want to do, and that I'm interested in curatorially. I feel like, if I can do one every year and half or two years, that would be good. Yeah, I would be stoked about that.
CC: You're making a short horror film, right? Have you finished making it? Did you start it at Skowhegan?
KO: I shot it at Skowhegan [last summer] in this creepy house from the late 1800's.
I had a love/hate relationship with the piece. I tend to like their personalities [and] it's rare, but I just didn't like [this one]. I was like "I don't like you, don't come around here. If I see you around here, I'll punch you in the face." Then I remembered that I promised to show it to Linda, the Executive Director of Skowhegan. I was like, "Yeah I should show her." I really like her. She's real smart.
I got a rough cut together and I was like you're not so bad, you're all right, you know. It's one of the few times I made a piece and had a sense that there was no rush or deadline. I was much more diffuse about my approach to it which is unlike me in general with my work. I tend to be pretty focused about my work. But, the horror film is just mad creepy.
CC: You just walked into that house and immediately thought "This is creepy."
KO: It's not like The Shining...it's like The Shining's bootleg. It's real creepy. You could see that there had to be something creepy [at Skowhegan], if you would just dig a little. Linda the Executive Director used to live there. I was like, "How did you live here?"
The film is about these two Siamese twins. They get possessed and split themselves apart. They get obsessed with these shoes that come between them and the shoes consume them. There are two rooms; one room is all white with two twin beds and a room that is green with two twin beds. They're all identical, the beds, the rooms, except they're just in different colors.
CC: You didn't do this? It was your natural backdrop?
KO: That's just how it was. Then there was a powder room in the house, where it's drawers almost floor to ceiling and a closet, and the room is like seven feet wide and it has a mirror. You come in and you're already claustrophobic. Then you start pulling out drawers.
CC: Yeah, that's a little scary.
To Big for Your Breaches, 2006. Mixed media.
KO: I'm about to shoot this new film about these roller dancers who are high school students that sneak out of their house onto the roof. It's set in the 80's and they battle each other roller skating. I had an uncle who was always saying everybody should have their secrets. I have a dear friend of mine who was talking about how trust was not about whether somebody tells you everything; it's about if you believe them and about whether or not you trust you're good with them. Believing them is key.
Growing up in New York you needed those magic spaces. I feel like that's where you go, you go to the rooftop, it's the only open space in the city. And you feel like you're in the heavens, there's these little stars, there's the stars from the building those little glints of light, and you have all the time in the world, until the sun comes up. As a city kid and as a night owl, night has always had that for me.
CC: Have you always been an artist? Or have you always wanted to be one?
KO: I always made stuff, I didn't always want to be in art. I always had a horse. I went from loving animals and wanting to be a zookeeper, to then wanting to be an animal scientist at like 7 years old. I was always like "zoos are mean." [Laughter]
Then I was into math; physics was going to be my job, because I loved math and I was really good at math. I was good at calculus. I got into physics in high school and I was like "I love this."
CC: I sensed the genius in you and now I'm hearing more about it.
KO: [Laughs] Physics was fun.
CC: Just so you know, you're a geek.
KO: Physics is the new hotness. It's the old hotness, but it's still the new hotness.
Then I was into music in high school too. I was playing a saxophone, but I couldn't afford a saxophone, so my junior high school had one. Then we moved and I didn't have it anymore.
Then I started writing and was really into poetry. When I was in high school I was doing poetry readings and was with Dark Room Collective, which was a group of writers out of Boston. It was started by Tom Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange. It was charted by Derek Walcott he was at, I think, Boston University then and then he went to Harvard. It was a great experience for me. I went to Bard [College] for poetry and photography...I didn't learn photography until late in high school. I really liked poetry though. I didn't like fiction, I still don't. I don't like novels and I tend not to read them. I like science books and poetry. I like the density of poetry and the speed of it. It's like high octane, smash mouth sumo wrestling...
CC: So you're a Renaissance man. Going back to your exhibition at Skylight Gallery, who are some of your heroes?
KO: They [cross] art, physics, poetry, music, and wrestling. But I was going to say Greg Louganis.
Heartaches and Toothaches, (Still #4), 2005. Digital video.
CC: The swimmer?
KO: The diver. Louganis is pretty gangsta. I went on this long tirade when a friend of mine asked me about great Americans, and I said "Greg Louganis." He said, "Really?" And I said, "Yo...he busts his head open at the Olympics. He comes out, his whole team cold-shouldered him..." Remember?
CC: Yeah, there was blood everywhere...
KO: And they all said, [whispering] "But what if he has AIDS? What if he has AIDS?"
You know, he got a zero; he bombed on that dive. Then the man was like, "I'm Greg mother fuckin' Louganis, dude. You might want to research this."
And he came back to win a gold! He's rackin' 'em up, you know. He got so much gold, he in the ghetto sellin' it. [Laughter]
Forced to Fight the Sun, 2006. 14-kt gold and pure silver.
KO: I like Siqueiros...I like Josef Koudelka and his book Chaos. It's pure visual language. Chuck [Charles Kelton] is my mentor. He's a great photographer and he's printed for the entire history of photography. I grew up in his lab. I got there when I was 18 and I said, "I'm a pretty good printer. Me, I'm pretty good." Chuck is sick with it, he's just sick. You want to hit him and take his ball.
CC: And how did you come to know him?
KO: A friend of mine's father had a project involving all these glass plate negatives. He said, "Chuck, if you have an internship, I have a young man that might be interested." Chuck said, "Yeah, we have interns sometimes." And my friend's father goes, "Yeah, but he's a lot." Chuck asks, "What do you mean, he's a lot?" "A LOT," he said. Chuck said, "Send him down."
So then I went down there, and it was funny, I was working there one day a week. A year later, I left Bard and I moved to the city and was working there pretty regularly, six hours a day. I'd break all kinds of shit. I'd flood things. I was a straight-up mess. I'd get amped up and I was loud. Everyone said, "What is he really doing here, Chuck? Why is he here?" Chuck said, "Hey babe, you know, I think he's a good photographer." That was thirteen years ago. If it weren't for Chuck, I would probably not be a photographer.
Larry Fink, also a photographer, got me addicted to flash photography. I met him at Bard and studied under him. I shot flash exclusively for years. Oh, and I like Nina Simone and Jimmy [Hendrix]. I like a lot of David Hammons' work. Who else? I'm usually drawn to particular pieces.
I like Matthew Barney because of the scale. I think it's really important to keep people who make you say, "Are you for real?" People who do things and make you think, "Are you serious? That's what's up?" Oftentimes, especially in a city, you're trapped by so much [so] people think small. I think the city makes you think anything is possible, but I'm finding that there's a scale limitation to the city. It's hard. You don't have open space to make something 20 feet. You go to Montana, you can make something 20 feet that looks like a piece of lint in the landscape.
I think that's another thing that came out of Skowhegan. I dug a big moat, 25 feet across, for this horror film [and it was] nothing. That's the thing about Skowhegan [as well as] people like Matthew Barney... It's important to keep [process and challenge] in the front of your mind.
CC: Let's talk about your show at Gallery 138, your first solo exhibition. Are you still on a high from that?
KO: That was straight brutal. Making it was not a fun process.
CC: How long did you work on it?
KO: Eight months, all new work. Brookie Maxwell, the gallery director, gave me so much freedom. I said I wanted to do a catalog, she said, "Bet." I said I wanted to photograph it and design it, she said, "Bet." My dumb ass. How are you going to say, "Yeah, I was thinking I'd shoot some works while they're in progress, while I'm making it." Yeah, that sounds like a day at the beach...but it really was...It was great and tough. When you're ambitious, you're only ambitious if you pull it off. If you don't pull it off, you bit off more than you could chew. You never know where that line is until it's done.
... The actual work of it was really difficult. A lot of people helped me pull it off. There were 14 karat gold chains that I designed. There was a glass piece. There was a twelve-foot sculpture that I built. There was O'Wolf-Wolf with the wolf tickets, designing the wolf tickets, getting those printed. It was just a myriad of very different pieces.
I was excited about having the chance to sort of set the parameters of the discussion and say that this cohesion was not based on all of them looking alike [or] all them being the same color. There's a conceptual cohesion [but] there are also a bunch of gaps and [the viewer has] to leapfrog between the pieces. It was my belief before the project was done that in those gaps is where the real art is made. The feeling that you get when you go from say Heartaches and Toothaches to Shot Through the Heart, it's not that you get something [from one to the next, but] there's an intangible space [between them] that I can actually work with exclusively in a solo show and that's the big difference [from a group show].
Instead of like two pieces, I control this whole space and so when you move between the pieces there's a whole other dialog. There are comparisons that happen. There's undermining, you can have your work undermine you. You know, you can bring up doubt. You can reaffirm things. I was like, this opportunity is black gold.
Plank #1 "Do or Die" #2, 2006. Mixed-media.
CC: You put a lot of faith in your audience to make those leaps and stay with you from one object to the next?KO: Well, I didn't feel like they were necessarily going to agree. So after I made it, I tried to be an audience member to see if it felt like that structure was there. I was interested in having the ability to create that scenario, a [particular] situation.
And then there was a big emotional impact, like a severe emotional impact. I mean, Nina Simone was kind of a tie to my mother who passed in 1998. Simone was a way of understanding my mother and sort of worked to [create] a bridge with her after she passed. And though [the works and over all idea were] constructed by me it became really really tough. The only way the fact of feeling really devastated when Simone passed. I never met her. To have grief for someone you never met part of you feels like it's unwanted. It's unfair. Like you're stealing grief from somebody who like knew her or lived with her and then it was like what do I do in terms of my connection with my mother. All those things, it was a way someone who lived and breathed and still affirm that connection. And so when I was doing pieces there was a lot of sadness, a lot of grief, a lot of resentment that would come up.
That's what the pieces - they're really emotional for me. And so to try to figure out how to be articulate about it and there was no place to go I felt like. I was forced into a corner at my apartment so the rest could be a studio. And even that corner, a small room in my house had all of these designs and I had a computer back there for different things. So there was no way of escaping it and it just consumed me. It was really intense. And it almost makes me think, there was a point when I'm glad I had no idea. I'm glad I had no idea it was going to be like this, because I don't know that I would have - I wouldn't have believed it.
I've heard of hard before. I've seen hard on TV, but it was like fighting yourself. I was like, these are your rules. You don't have to make work that's emotional for you. You don't have to, you don't. And I don't think that it's a line that dissects good work from bad work, but it's where I believe. And I believe that my process is about that - sharing myself as well as sharing my ideas. Well actually, my ideas I feel are really important to me. And so it was like finding yourself and you decided that you want to do this. I said to my man Chris before, when I found out about this show, I want this to be an undertaking. I really want to bring the heat. And for me it was an undertaking.
CC: And are you anxious to do it again?
KO: Yeah, as soon as it was done, I was like once someone walked on the Plank. There's this piece called Plank #1 you walk up and you walk out. And I was nervous. I tested it with my weight and I weigh 220 and we rated it for 160 and I would say with 60 pounds of stupid. People would be like, "I'm 160." I'm like, "Dude, come on you're my size you know you're not 160. Is that metric? What's going on here?" So we rated it for 160, but there was still a tension, at least I felt it as the artist and I also I got it from people. People said to me "This shit is not comfortable. It's unsettling." People felt like they were put on display, forced to do this challenge. I was like, "That's the point. That's what it's like to walk the plank. That's what living in crisis is like." Once somebody walked the plank and came back and everything was okay, I was like, "Oh, so for my next show I was thinking..." [Laughter]
CC: Let's go back to our subway talk about confections. Right now, you're having a Snapple. You're supposed to be eating a cream puff.
KO: I have to eat whatever my confection is?
CC: Yes, while we're talking. So we have to do a follow up or stop this recording and go to the store.
KO: Let's do a follow up, because I want something good. What about Italian cheesecake?
CC: I've never had it.
KO: See, you're living in the dark girl. I can take you to some spots and have you strung out.
All images courtesy the artist.
