I've got two interviews for you this month, both centering around the creative process. These were conducted in relation to my Gallery 110 solo show from last year, which you can learn more about here (including video of a very fun art talk!).

• UW Magazine. Ordinary to Extraordinary: Nathan Vass slows down time with his photography and writing, by Aleenah Ansari. This one's an overview of my photographic process and how it relates to bus driving.
  
• International Examiner. Q&A: Engaging ephemera with imagemaker Nathan Vass’ “Present Perfect,” by Kevin Phan. This piece dives deeper into process and philosophy behind artmaking, discussing specific approaches and things I try to achieve in photo.
  

I post once a month, at the beginning of the month– check back soon for an epic piece about the very last 7/49, which by super special request I was lucky enough to drive!

My jaw dropped in amazement and pleasure.
“Sho Luv!!!” I exclaimed, as he stood before me at Third and Columbia, a resurrected friend from my bygone 358 days. "Oh my goodness!!!"

He burst wide with a grin, the same grin he's always had, the kind of beaming smirk you feel is letting you in on a secret. Maybe he shares that with me because we hail from the same neighborhood in South Central LA, South Gate. I exclaimed, “I'm so happy to see you!"

Sho Luv was too, and told me about recently seeing a driver just like me, getting his keys replaced, and other sundries of the morning.

He settled in, sprawling out in the front side seats. Reflecting. “Last I seen you I think you was goin’ through a breakup,” he said. “Did you end up findin’ someone new?”

I was impressed by his memory. (I'm just the bus driver!) The reality of the mess he alluded to was, and remains, too complicated to sum up in a sentence. You've been there. I’m in a better place now than I was, and by way of so intimating I said aloud, “I sure did!”
He cackled. “Ah knew you would! Tha’s my dude! I knew it, you're still young….”
“Your prophecy was correct!”
“They say when somethin’ is taken away from you, the next thing to come around’ll be that much better.”
“You know it! It's just so hard to see in the moment, right?”
“Yeah, you were in deep feelin’ it. I remember. I used to call you Chris but your name is Nate, right?”
“Yeah!”
“Nate the Great!”
“Exactly, Nate the Great. I'm not that great though!”

He moved to deboard, here at 3rd and Pike (or simply "Ross,” as we call it out here), but changed his mind upon seeing the melee outside, which was a touch worse than the already unsightly norm.

“Naw, I'll go to Virginia.”
“Let's go to Virginia. Let all this mess die down a little.”
He was looking outside. “What d’you make of all these zombies?”

Maybe the term sounds derogatory from the remove of an office or home armchair. I know how using the right vocabulary is of utmost importance in today's more educated circles, and I appreciate such well-meaning value. But things work differently out here on the street. We find ourselves putting greater emphasis on action. The words don't have to be so perfect. If you spend enough time at “the Blade," not passing through it or going around it or reading about it but in it, Sho Luv’s intention reveals itself as less pejorative than mere descriptor: a blend of observation, sarcasm, dejection and concern. These are buddies of ours out here.

“It's crazy,” I replied. “Yeah back then, that was, I was doin’ the E Line, it was the breakup, and it was pandemic, lockdown…”
“That was the bad time. Everybody so dePRESSed.”
“That was rough. All of it mixed together, I couldn't see straight.”
“Whole city falling apart. And now we got all these zombies, kids killin’ kids, killin’ themselves, I don't even know.”
“You know, I was driving this route, past Garfield last week when that kid killed the other kid. I was there right as it all got shut down.”
“They were friends, too!”
I said, “WHAT?”
“Yeah. He intervened to break up the fight, and boom. All three of ‘em were friends, just horsin’ around. Kid was eighteen years old, jus’ ‘bout to graduate. And now, it's like they both dead now.”
“Oh my goodness. That’s a heartbreaker. I had no idea they were buddies. He just got in there to break it up!”
“Yeah.”
“Like any reasonable person. Oh, man, that's heavy.”
“And Garfield’s a Magnet school!”
He'd read my mind. “Exactly Garfield that's one of our best schools!! I mean shootings shouldn't be happening anywhere, but they definitely don't happen at Garfield. It's Garfield!”

And then it was time to answer someone’s question, how to get to the Trailside Apartments, route 24. I heard Sho on his phone: “I be there in a couple minutes. Ah ran into my buddy from the bus line. Nate from South Gate! Yeah!”

Sometimes the fact that Life has to keep going on feels insulting. Why can't the whole world pause, and take stock of itself? Sometimes you just want to sit and watch the rain. A young life was pointlessly wiped out. Where is the space for the paralysis we feel?

But eventually life begins calling out to us, calling us back into the fray. It happens gradually. The grocery list. Phone calls, errands. Then friends. Maybe Life’s continuous, nigh-maddening onward march is exactly what we need. What are we to do, but learn and move forward? Do we stay paralyzed, or do we tend with care to those who are still around?

We will choose to help them. We will tell them how to get to the Trailside Apartments. It's about the person next to us.

I know that's what gotten me through my own hard times, comfortable though they are by comparison. Receiving that energy from others, but most of all giving it out, or trying to. Love. It is a thing we attempt, a verb, a project, and finally a noun that we acquire by giving away, giving it all away, all the time.

Tending to the living. These can be the first steps.

***Stand by~***

Due to popular reaction this post will soon be reappearing here and elsewhere in more exciting fashion! Stay tuned!

This is a revised 2016 article focusing exclusively on Wiley's art and its relationship with craft and labour.
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Some weeks ago I posted a glowing review of SAM's recent Kehinde Wiley show, which I loved. I stand by that review, but wish to add some context which I find troubling enough to consider necessary.

I knew when I saw the show that Wiley didn't paint everything in the paintings, but the implications of both Wiley's and SAM's blasé attitude toward this enormous fact didn't hit me until after taking in the show a second time.

The most disappointing element is the lack of demand by writers, thinkers and viewers to know who made the paintings and how. When concept takes center stage in the appreciation of art, talent, skill, and craftsmanship get relegated to secondary levels of importance, which means the authors of that skill and how they accomplish their work becomes less consequential. 

To look through every one of the books on Wiley at the show and have none of them even address the multiplicity of authorship question is not simply an insult to viewers (does SAM really expect us to think a thirty-six year-old is this skilled and prolific in painting, glass, bronze, and marble?), but an embarrassment on the part of the authors and curators themselves. It guides the discussion into that tiring realm where concept is king, and craftsmanship is discussed only with superlatives because critics who have no experience in the art form can't talk about it in depth, and thus focus only on what they, and anyone else with extensive knowledge in realms besides painting and sculpture, can: content. 

This divide becomes immediately apparent when listening to the difference between how tour guides talk when discussing art before vs. after the Modern period. Take a look at Fred Wiseman's mammoth fly-on-the-wall documentary National Gallery and listen to how the tour guides discuss Vermeer and Hans Holbein II. They talk about 1) craft and 2) how it expresses ideas. Tour guides of the Wiley show are saddled with the awkward task of discussing only the second part. I recall a particularly embarrassing moment at SAM wherein a viewer who happened to be a skilled stained-glass artist asked how a human hand could possibly accomplish the texture and shading of denim jeans on a single pane of glass, to which the poor tour guide had to reply that she had neither any idea how that was accomplished, nor who, or what, had accomplished it. 

We can be blunt and overstate the point by quoting Tom Stoppard: "imagination without skill gives us modern art." But I argue the real villains in this case are not the artists but those who shape the discussion. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word is instructive here. To forget that content and form are inextricably linked is to miss much of what is beautiful about art and the decisions artists make. We've heard the phrase "style over substance" leveled against films as a criticism; as I've written elsewhere, you generally hear that phrase from people who aren't filmmakers. The style in a worthwhile art piece is the substance. Style, or form, is the language through which the content is relayed to a viewer. Form lives and dies on the strength of the artist's talent. 

Wiley's works would remain striking, in my opinion, after learning that he only paints touch-ups on the faces and some of the skin tones, that the figures and floral pattern work are painted by Chinese laborers, that the sculpture work is done by assistants, that the models are only paid a measly $20, and that the stained glass works are created entirely by individuals skilled in that realm (using photographs by Wiley as a base). The only thing that would suffer is Wiley's massive ego. We might also more easily understand the strange lack of passion one always detects upon inspecting a Wiley up close; an intricate but flat, uninspired collection of brushstrokes. No wonder. That the above authorship information is difficult to come by is disappointing on the part of Wiley and SAM, but so too is the lack of outcry on the part of viewers. 

It thusly becomes understandable that Wiley declines journalist's visits to his studio, unless it's to have Martin Schoeller take a picture of him dabbing at a canvas while sitting atop a horse; that he tells reporters he doesn't want us to know to what degree his actual involvement is in the painting process, evading questions with coy comments about preserving his "secret sauce." This is where he differs from Brueghel and Botticelli. No artist of great skill hides his talent behind a cloak of coy false modesty. If you didn't paint it, but your students did, it gets signed "School of Michelangelo." There's an understanding that it was a group effort. Practices like these have remained better documented throughout history in part because the students et al nearly always, unlike the case with Wiley, hail from the same language and culture as the primary artist.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Chihuly. Koons. Crewdson. I say close, but no Kehinde. They're not quite  corollaries; these artists and others like them, who heavily involve assistants, don't shroud their processes in secrecy, but hold it open for all to see and determine the worth of the works. For heaven's sake, we all know Koons doesn't make his own stuff. 

There's another, more troubling reason why Wiley stands alone here. Unlike the folks above, Wiley's work is explicitly intended to counter the subjugation of marginalized (black) people in Western Art. Personally I love the idea. So far, so great. How does he accomplish this? 

By subjugating and rendering nameless the marginalized (Asian) peoples who create these artworks for him. 

He's eliminating subjugation one heroic step at a time, using: subjugation. Let's flip the races around and see how it sounds. The twenty-first century's wealthiest white artist creates enormous volumes of high-impact portraits of Asians, rescuing them from repression and facelessness, by farming out the work to nameless black laborers in developing countries worldwide. In gut-busting levels of hubris, said artist refuses to credit or acknowledge the specific contributions of these black men and women in the name of preserving the mystique of his "secret sauce." 

We're in the middle of what should be the biggest conversation in art right now.

Most items we consume are created by hardworking poor people across the world who get zilch recognition. As China continues to develop and labor costs gradually rise, many manufacturing entities are opening plants elsewhere in the continued search for cheap labor. I don't appreciate this exploitative trajectory, but I can understand it. Wiley follows the trend, citing cost savings. However, he's in a financial position where this behavior is unnecessary. Kehinde Wiley is quite possibly the richest American artist of his generation. He doesn't need to be using social constructs of oppression in order to righteously attack social constructs of oppression. As one of many thousands of struggling artists of Asian descent, you can guess my perspective here.

No, the fact that Wiley is barely involved with the hands-on element of his final works is not the scandal. The scandal isn't even that the authorship is kept an unanswered question. It's that the laborers, painters, stained-glass workers and sculptors are kept nameless and repressed, and no one notices, or even thinks to ask about it.

That's the scandal. 

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Further reading:

Outsource to China, a detailed NY Magazine piece on Wiley, who candidly admits he often abandons his celebrated "street-casting" process.
Kehinde Wiley's Dilemma: How the Artist Painted Himself Into a Corner With His New Works​. Ben Davis explores Wiley's portraits of women at Sean Kelly.
Background Considerations: Christian Frock considers the issues during Wiley's 2013 launch at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. 
Nay Sayin': John James Anderson explores the degree to which Wiley "keeps it real."
Stop Lionizing Kehinde Wiley's Paintings. Stop Dismissing Them, Too, ​by our own Jen Graves.

Art Access, the longstanding monthly catalogue, is comprised mostly of lists and announcements, informing readers of the month's Pacific Northwest art events. In addition to these listings, there are always (about) three feature articles which open the issue. You can pay to be listed in the directory of announcements. You can pay to have your artwork in the listings, or shown on the cover. But you can't pay to be the subject of one of those three feature articles. They decide that. How do they decide? No one knows. It's their secret sauce. I didn't invest any thought into even hoping they might choose me for their July 2023 issue, back when my solo show (more here and here) was happening. What made them decide to? How did they even know about me? Who knew Elizabeth Bryant and I would get along so well, spending an afternoon looking over work and discussing everything under the sun, going well over our allotted time in excited bonding.

Like most of the special things that happen to us, I can't explain what led to this all transpiring. To some eyes it's just another article in another publication, quickly forgotten and replaced by other matters. But for me it is a thing I cherish, not because of the publicity boost it no doubt brought (my show had record attendance), but because of the serendipity involved, the people involved, the celebration of art and a fleeting but meaningful moment of connection. More than any other piece that's been written about my work, Elizabeth gets what my work is about, and what it aims to achieve. This is the best articulation so far of what I'm hoping to do with my practice. It's short and sweet, like everything about Art Access, but what Ms. Bryant conveys in a short space is admirable for being so accurate, and so succinct.

Read it here!

I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Wirth through a mutual friend. Some people strike you deeply, if such a thing is possible, not with their prestige or accolades but with their unassuming nature. You know beforehand of their significant accomplishments, but upon finally meeting are most impressed by the their warmth and humanity. Where their CV isn't the crowning definition of their identity so much as, quite simply, their kindness. Their humanness. People like to hide behind accomplishments. I'm more impressed when someone prioritizes not their resume but goodness, putting people first. It's so easy to get caught up in what we do; but what about who we are? This blurb of his accomplishments–

"Dr. Wirth, PhD, is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Seattle University. He was the Theiline Pigott McCone Chair in Humanities from 2014 to 2016, and his books include Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, and, most recently, Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy After Comparative Philosophy."

–like many blurbs (including my own), reveals very little about the person in question. Yes, those are indeed excellent works he's written. But my desire to share his words on my film stem from a deeper appreciation for his personhood. Where the books are merely an extension of his being. I aspire toward something like that. The film is an amalgamation of things I've reflected upon while in the presence of giants. Here are further musings on those reflections, by one I'm lucky to have met.

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Reflections on Men I Trust

I have long thought that in the face of death, especially the death of another, we all become, at least for a few minutes, philosophers. Given that philosophy opens the possibility that we might speak to death and face it directly, we typically turn away, revealing our philosophy to be merely the kinds of self-deceptions that had already governed our living.

This deeply moving film, free of all sentimentality and, for that reason, all the more moving, derives its power by standing in the white heat of this moment as death exposes human living as without “why” and cancels for the dying all of the scientific “hows.” Just as life does not need to be filled with the extraordinary and the spectacular to be precious and intrinsically good, so this film concentrates on the supposedly ordinary, which, cast against the background of its loss, reappears as sufficient in themselves and boundlessly precious.

Without retreating into the abstract, this is also a film about time—yes, death proves time. As such, however, it is allows the power of the moment to appear: not how something is, or why it is (as if explaining death either justifies it or renders it more palatable), but rather the infinite preciousness—and fragility and impermanence—that it is. Mahayana Buddhists call this suchness, things just as they are—fleeting, impermanent, and yes, enough. It is enough that they are simply what they are. They did not have to be more to be worthy of cherishment.

Technically, the editing is also a marvel as it layers and juxtaposes moments of time, each moment suddenly appearing precious: drinking water at the bar, dancing with your sister, speaking French, discussing whether to have children (and the problem of legacy as if we can cheat death by leaving something behind). Even walking in the forest to scatter ashes. Despite our ecological rapacity, there are still sword ferns and western red cedars and western hemlocks and Douglas firs, and their power remains in this moment irrefutable: that they are there.

I loved this film. It is beautiful and honest and it moved me to my core.

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Read other reviews of my film here. Learn more about the film at its official page, or check out the trailer below.
Contact me via the About page if you'd like a secure link to see the film!

I. Repulsion

They slobber past you with their bodies, at once aimless and committed, a sort of slow-motion resolve in that stumbling post-COVID gait we now know so well. Never before have they existed in such casual profusion. There were more closed doors back then, places to hide, institutions to rely on. Now things are different. As long as drugs are more accessible than solutions, people will medicate their problems with the former.

You can kill yourself at Third and Pike now for eighty-eight cents.

It is easy for we the sober-minded to laugh, to marvel at the stupidity of strangers. Look at them, sagging their pants below the knees, fishing through litter, pawing at the cement not for scraps of food but for the smallest, most unlikely hint of a fix. Here is one sitting in a pool of his own excrement, another huffing down stolen ice cream to rebalance his blood sugar, snot glazing across his mustache and lips, feeding into blood from open sores. “They pay money to look like that,” a scruffy but drug-free passenger on my bus chuckled as he watched them outside, incredulously. “They actually pay money to fall asleep! Idiots. Dumbasses!”

Look at their muscles collapsing from the hips up, a new generation that stands with head and knees at equal height, legs bent and bending lower, keeling over from a high finally, reaching for the earth’s opposite horizon. The comical walk and Dickensian squalor of their clothes and skin, almost a dress code by this point; we call them lost, these haphazard solipsists, slinking ever onward in their knock-kneed gait.

They are so easy to ridicule. 

II. However

There is always a however, and never moreso than here. We the Sober can involve the future in our decision-making. We can consider others. The addicted brain does not. Its comprehension of the future only extends as far as acquiring its next fix: an hour maybe, or less than that. Life is measured in blinkered minutes. Only in such a tunnel can the decisions we see out here begin to make sense.

Do you know what an accomplishment it is, to resist a pill? To flush your supply down the toilet, say no, ask for help?  These are actions harder and more worthy of our praise than winning the Nobel Prize. The trepidatious tender courage needed moves me more than those who win elections, run companies, more than lofty resumes and mantles stuffed with trophies. Is an achievement somehow less, because it goes unrecorded? Particularly with what I know about addiction’s effect on brain chemistry, I bow to the person who finds it in themselves to refuse a drink, pill, straw, needle, powder, patch. 

These are the silent accomplishments. Imagine regarding your strung-out self in a bathroom mirror (at a gas station, at a mansion), and seeing those gaunt eyes staring back, as you remember who you thought you could one day be. Not this. You remember you can still start over, and then you do so. You act.

That is the battle these people are trying to win. It is a shameful and humiliating battle but they fight it in public, ignominiously, while the rest of us shake our heads and judge. These people deserve pity, not ridicule.

“They” were all you and me once, children with prospects and dreams, things that made them excited and sad and hopeful. They did not know they would one day start fights over nothing, soil themselves in public, walk into the road not caring if they live or die. 

They did not know the halfway point of their lives when it whizzed right past them.

III. Personally

I attended elementary and junior high school with a girl named Alana. Being the same age we shared many classes, sitting next to each other in Math and Language Arts, and again in Social Studies. She was pretty and kind and smart enough. Many years later she'd board my 3/4 with her Shih Tzu in tow, surprised when I remembered her full name. She recalled mine as well. We trundled down Third Avenue in good spirits. She was searching her cluttered bags for her phone, thrilled when it began ringing. “Bye, Nathan Vass!” she called out as she left. 

Everything seemed fine.

Then I would see her intermittently, across several years. A decline was underway. I began seeing her in the unforgiving back alleys of the city, too much makeup now, a puffy jacket and flip-flops in cold weather; with different men each time. Shame crept into her gaze, and then the rest. The only constant was her smile to me and the dog, always her faithful Shih Tzu accompanying her. 
“I'm glad he's always at your side,” I'd say.
“We've been through a lot together,” she'd reply.
Alana would die before either of us reached twenty-five. Alana McCrawley from Math class and Language Arts, who remembered my full name. Her dog would end up outliving her.

What was her final thought?

I stop for the people at 12th and Jackson. I don't pass them up, and they know that. I want them to know that. Somebody there will always wave if they want me, almost frantically, because they’re so used to being passed by. I respond with my own wave. Some of my favorite passengers out here. “Aw, it's Nathan,” one said recently, with happy relief. “He's not gonna fuck with us!” I want them to know my bus is a little different. This is the guy who cares, who doesn't look down on us. That's what I'm trying for.

Some of them will make it out and live to tell me about it. Some already have. Others of us don't know that we'll unravel, a paycheck or a bottle of pain medication away from Western society's most slippery slope. Maybe it'll be us one day, stumbling against glass and concrete dirt, another slipshod pants-sagging drifter in search of joy, meaning, conscience, belonging… wondering where it all went, baffled by how elusive those things are now. Who among them used to have it easy? Who among them once snickered, looking outside, really believing themselves as they laughed, that'll never be me.

Do not be too quick to sneer. The story is not over yet.

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More on this whole situation here: State of the (Seattle) Union

We are still in the era of virtual events. Here's another, now passed but recorded for your pleasure– wherein I discuss all things transit, COVID, writing, kindness, and the condition of the street. Like all Zoom videos it's not up to snuff in terms of the cinematography and image quality that we might prefer, but hopefully the content is enough to maintain interest. Huge, huge  gratitude to Brock Howell and everyone at SnoTrac for putting this together and hosting me. It was an honor and a treat to meet you all!

For more speeches and talks of mine click here.

Enjoy!