You often create sculptures that feature a humanoid, feminine figure. Is she representative of you? How did you arrive at this form of figurative sculpture?

I grew up in a small town in Florida, and never did art. But I felt like I had to go to art school. And as soon as I began drawing and sculpting, these forms just happened. I was so curious about the imagery that came without any control, because the heart of the artistic process is the unleashing of the unconscious. That’s the bedrock of my work: exploring nodes in this huge network of unconscious realms we all share, through our DNA and through history.

They remind me of Greek mythology or medieval fantasy. The style feels really old. But I’ve never seen anything like it, so it’s new at the same time. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics that feel outside of time and space.

I feel strongly influenced by mythology, because through these characters, I’m creating my own mythology. If the universe is infinite, every possible version of myself exists, and I’m exploring my relationship to the limitless potential of the universe through these figures that are reminiscent of ancient ancestors, morphed into futuristic forms. 

I’m super into decoding what’s left of ancient, lost civilizations. The Egyptians, the Mayans. They influence us — we share infinite wisdom with past civilizations. We have the ability to tap into that, and the human journey is about the envelopment of those psychic powers, that cyclical knowledge.

Does this translate into your video work? You often feature yourself outdoors, morphing and shapeshifting.

I go out into nature, unclothed if I can be, to feel as subjected to the elements as possible. We are so desensitized to what it is to be alive — like, how fucking weird is it to be here? In those videos, I want to get in touch with that weirdness, that rapture of being. 

I use a GoPro in time lapse mode at the slowest interval settings. There’s no editing or VFX whatsoever, it’s all in camera. Watching the crystallization of form on my face, that archive of each second flowing into the next, is phenomenally fascinating to me.

A GoPro is a beautiful camera, but it was made to be a mass consumer product. It’s exhilerating to watch how artists fuck with the consumer tech we’ve been granted by our technocratic overlords.

That’s our human instinct: to take whatever already exists and deconstruct it, reinvent it, fuck with it. I think about the Garden of Eden a lot, because that’s what the serpent was. It came into the Garden of Eden, looked around, and was like, “you should fuck with it.” I think that’s key to being human. 

I have this idea that the forbidden fruit was a psychedelic, and when Eve ate it, it awakened her intuition and called her to realize her own self, her own image, her own desires. And that unfolded across eternity, that deep desire towards self knowledge. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, and they believe that the serpent was God’s angel, created by God. That’s why I sculpt my Cellves (amalgamation of Cells, Elves, and Selfs), a girl with her legs spread and a snake coming out of her. That’s the serpent coming out of Eve herself, and I made it to tell the story of how the darkness is the same force as the light. It has a higher purpose, it tells us to not be content with our own ignorance.

Someone told me that in the early days after Jesus’ death, all of his followers were in a mushroom cult. The ichthys was apparently a mushroom symbol.

It's amazing you bring that up, I’m reading a book about that called The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku. He went on a deep dive into these ancient Biblical towns where the events of Christianity took place, during Jesus’ time and before that, and uncovers the roots of Christianity as a religion of taking mushrooms. That’s what our deepest-rooted moralism and ethics are based on, these mystical practices that have since become marginalized and taboo.

But now there’s a recovery of psychedelic practices, which pertains to this idea of the fall of Rome. The fall of Rome is inevitable, but at the same time, as it falls, the new emerges. There’s always this flux, this ebb and flow of light and darkness.

For me, the fall of Rome is the realization that the American empire has been a catastrophe from the start, but now the facade is gone. We’re used to phone notifications with crazy, scary news headlines. We’ve woven these things into our everyday lives. But there is liberation in collapse. There’s a duality of the fall being terrible, but also fun and full of opportunity.

Yeah. I think of that scene in The Matrix Reloaded, where the last of humanity is about to fight the machines and they’re pretty sure they’re going to lose and everybody’s going to die. So, they party. And I think that’s our only choice in a way. 

But simultaneously, we have control over what’s happening. That’s the artist’s job, to make people aware of that. To go deep underground inside themselves and tap into ancient memories of what humanity has learned, what we will learn, then collide it into real space and time.

You’re saying the artist works across multiple temporalities.

It’s an overwhelming thought, but it’s inevitable that everything that’s already happened is going to happen again, and anything that could ever happen has already happened.

My favorite artist is Pipilotti Rist, she does large-scale installations and her videos have a similar schtick. I admire her approach to technology — that even a camera or a computer has its own form of consciousness, however condensed or vast that might be. A tree has a perspective, as much as a camera lens has its own perspective, which is why technology is so fascinating for humans. It’s us replicating ourselves, then seeing how far that replication will push itself, which in turn, allows us to push ourselves even further.

I like GAN technology that looks at, say, 100 pictures of a dog, then replicates what a dog looks like, and the result is an ever morphing creature that is all of them and none of them at the same time. That’s amazing. That’s what I mean about technology being a mirror of ourselves.

It’s doing this thing that we do all the time, but can’t watch from the outside. Because any time I say a word to you, or reference something, you’re doing what the GAN does. You’re sourcing through every past time you heard that word, to formulate what you think of it coming out of my mouth right now. Language is one of our oldest and highest technologies.

We don’t get to see the GAN generating the image, we only see the image. And it’s the same with us, communicating. You don’t get to see what’s going on in my brain, you just see the output in the form of speech.

We’re also processing each other’s body language, our facial expressions, and letting that inform us. There’s so many influences formulating this tornado of information that crystallizes in every moment of time. 

When I visualize that, I think of Alex Gray. His work is the stereotype of what psychedelics look like, but it has this crazy truth to it. He paints these eyes in a very precise geometric pattern, these constantly flowing fractals. Fractals are the perfect visual metaphor for energy, or life itself. This ever feeding, ever growing, massive formation of reflections. 

Crazy thing. To be alive. Whatever the fuck is going on has some wherewithal to figure it out. It knows what it’s doing.