Studio visits are a vital part of our artist-driven curatorial approach. It's a chance for us to hear directly from artists about how they are thinking, feeling, and making, and to see what they are working on. We meet artists at every stage of their career, and in any stage of a project, and in any space that's workable for them (yes, that includes living rooms!). Though every studio visit is different, these meetings are always a chance for us to get inside the artist's mind and show that we care about their work. Though COVID-19 has halted in-person visits of any kind, we are jumping into virtual visits with artists from Boston and beyond whose work has an important message for the public. For our third edition, we meet with L.A.-based artist Maya Gurantz.
Untangling the knot
In 2017, as a Carl Andre retrospective finished a multi-museum tour, I stumbled on Maya Gurantz's astute reflection on the show. Published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and titled "Carl Broke Something," Maya deconstructed the phrase uttered by the retrospective's co-curator, Philippe Vergne. The article felt like a breath of fresh air to me: I've long thought that Carl Andre was involved in the death of his wife, Ana Mendieta (he was acquited of her murder in 1988), and I am continually angry at his art-world acceptance. I quickly followed Maya on Instagram and learned that writing is just one part of her multi-faceted practice. A bent for deconstruction threads together her video, performance, installation, and "community-generated" projects.
Fast forward to spring 2020: quarantine. Maya and I finally got together, via Zoom, for a studio visit. It's morning for her in L.A. and early afternoon for me in Boston. Maya says this is her first Zoom studio visit and I can't believe it — she seems like a pro. We jump right in, discussing how she feels like her work is two strands of one knot, pulled in opposite directions. She likes complexity; and she wants her work to be "the center of the knot," as is demonstrated through several of her projects.
Maya's background is as a dancer and theater director. She moved toward visual art after years of work producing community theater. In the early 2000’s, she spent a year as an artist-in-residence with Mississippi Cultural Crossroads in Port Gibson, MS. She produced plays based on the oral history interviews she conducted with residents, developing a conversation-based research style.
A Hole in Space (Oakland Redux), 2015. Image courtesy of Maya Gurantz.
"Cultural crossroads" is an appropriate descriptor for A Hole in Space (Oakland Redux), (2015), a piece inspired by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's 1980 new media project A Hole in Space. While the 1980 version connected New York to L.A., Maya collaborated with fellow L.A.-based artist Ellen Sebastian Chang to connect two neighborhoods in Oakland, CA via a live, public video chat. The neighborhoods are in geographic proximity but separated socioeconomically. The neighborhoods’ differences were demonstrated even in their concerns about the project: one was uneasy about the surveillance that the project might imply, while the other worried about noise.
By connecting these two neighborhoods, Maya and her collaborator highlighted their complex divisions. The project still inspires a deconstruction of these differences, activated by spoken word.
Maya worked with Ellen again, as well as her husband, Sunhui Chang, for last fall's How to Fall in Love in a Brothel (2019). While Sunhui wrote an episodic script focused on the Korean American experience across several decades, Ellen and Maya worked to realize it as a complex, interactive video and installation based on a 1950s shoji room.
Detail of the Shoji Room from How to Fall in Love in a Brothel, 2019. Image courtesy of Maya Gurantz.
With walls of paper, the room slowly breaks down as viewers are invited to make holes to see inside. According to the piece's statement: "The invitation to look inside the shoji-screened room is also an invitation to witness intimate moments of conversation that are unassisted by modern technologies. Inside, viewers peer into a ritual space created by the artists, who have collaged stories and images of their secret family histories which cross the globe — from post-War South Korea to rural Mississippi, from World War II refugee camps in Kyrgyzstan, to Israel in the 1950s, and Guam in the 1970s. The stories sometimes rhyme and sometimes clash, while complicating notions of a "post-racial," "post-cultural," and "post-historical" identity in the 21st century. Over the course of the installation, as more holes are created in the shoji, the piece inverts itself — inside becomes outside, marks of intimacy are accreted, and watching and exchange become visible."
The spoken stories are crucial here — they illuminate how knowledge is shared, experienced, and remembered through oral histories.
From Poem of Elisa Lam, 2016-present. Image courtesy of Maya Gurantz.
Maya and I ended our visit by discussing Poem of Elisa Lam (2016-present), an unfinished project which will become a triptych. While I was unfamiliar with Lam's story, Angelinos will likely know of her mysterious death in 2013. The Internet supplied many conspiracy theories on what led to Lam's death after the Los Angeles Police released a video of Lam on an elevator. For the past several years, Maya has endeavored to deconstruct, gesture by gesture, Lam's last movements recorded in the video. Calling herself a "somatic detective," Maya has painstakingly studied the video depicting Lam (who was seemingly unaware of the surveillance) to try and understand the unknowable. "There's knowledge in her movements," Maya tells me.
Maya also tells me that she'd been finishing up the third piece in Poem of Elisa Lam as an artist-in-residence at the McColl Center in Charlotte, NC, when the pandemic hit. Still, she's emphatic that the triptych, once finished, is an "L.A. piece," to be shown there or far away from there. Certainly, Elisa Lam's is an L.A. story, but I wonder if the themes it explores — chiefly, the female psyche — need to be situated in place. The particularities of Elisa Lam's experience and Maya's deconstructed interpretation aren't universal. But decoupling Poem of Elisa Lam from L.A., and all that the place conjures, might do much to restore Lam's humanity, as the project seems intended to do.
Ending our Zoom, I feel like I've known Maya for a long time. It's a pandemic silver lining that we are more open to virtual studio visits than ever before. And much of Maya's work can (generously) be viewed via her website. But the call leaves me eager to return to in-person visits, in which communication isn't just speaking face-to-face, but includes non-verbal hand gestures or nervous ticks. I want to be a somatic detective, too.