by
Mark Daybell
MARK DAYBELL: It’s August 5, 2019 and I’m here with Ken Gonzales-Day in his studio in Silver Lake, California. Ken, can you tell me about your work?
KEN GONZALES-DAY: My work deals with the history of race and racial formation and is based in a conceptual photography model, which means the projects are research-based often taking place over a long period of time and ultimately finding a form that usually has some photographic presence and sometimes is determined by the space or the opportunity.
DAYBELL: Are there reoccurring themes in your work?
GONZALES-DAY: Definitely. I’ve been working on issues of race, whiteness, racialized violence, museum display, institutional representations of race, pretty much forever. Even my graduate work was starting to look at race. I wasn’t thinking of it that way at the time. It comes out of looking at queer aesthetics and queer politics and queer theory at least in the beginning. Then evolved in different directions based on the project. You could also reframe it and say the projects have all been about queer aesthetic or queer politics and leave the question of race out of it. That’s the way we talk about human difference at the institutional level and because of categories and disciplines we tend to separate race and gender, race and sexuality, but really, they’re all connected. They’re all kinds of marks of otherness that inform my work and many other artists’ work.
DAYBELL: What initially attracted you to art and art making?
GONZALES-DAY: I was always the class artists, even when I was in second and third grade. I was that kid that was drawing or working on something or making stuff out of papier-mâché or doing creative projects. Obviously, that’s an experience a lot of kids have. At what point does it become an art practice, I’m not quite sure. I’d say for many people probably the junior high years or high school years when you start to look for other people that are doing similar projects and find opportunities that seem fun or seem exciting. I eventually started taking classes at the local community college when I was still in high school because I had already mastered the skills being offered at my local high school.
DAYBELL: Did you receive a formal visual arts education?
GONZALES-DAY: I did. My undergraduate degree was from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I started at Parsons School of design, which I didn’t really like. And so, I transferred my junior year to Pratt, which I loved quite a lot. That was my BFA. Prior to that, I had studied as an exchange student in Europe for my senior year of high school. That gave me a little bit of priming for what a studio practice might be at the college level.
After that I got my first Masters in Art History from Hunter College in New York. Then I went to the Whitney independent study program, which at that time was a one-year program that included critical studies, studio art, had visiting speakers, and included a small studio space. After that I came to California and went to University of California, Irvine, which at that time had a very strong program in photography, Queer studies. They had a very diverse faculty racially and ethnically and so I was very drawn to that.
DAYBELL: Can you talk about how you begin a project?
GONZALES-DAY: Usually I begin a project because there’s an opportunity. Other times you sort of imagine as a visual artist or photographer, let’s say, you imagine there might be an exhibition and that exhibition might include a certain number of walls. So, you start to think, “would this be five pieces? Is this one piece? Is this 10 pieces?” Some of it is thinking about space because we all have a lot we’d love to say but we don’t often get the opportunity to have a lot of space to say it in. Particularly young artists who are more likely to be in a group show and you may only get to exhibit one or two piece. In that case, the question becomes, how do you tell your story in one or two pieces? So, for me, the project begins in knowing a little bit about the context and what the space may afford.
DAYBELL: How does the history of art and art making influence your process?
GONZALES-DAY: I have always been interested in the history of art and art making. I have a master’s in art history and I was an art history minor in undergraduate. I think because the methodology behind my projects is similar or identical to the research or practice that would be followed by a historian or somebody working with other forms of cultural materialism, that is to say, looking at the history of objects and how they’ve come to be in the world, to some people my work might seem more like art history than art. But it’s not. My work is informed by the history of art but it’s not art history in the sense that I’m asking new questions or different questions. And in a way I’m asking questions the art historian can’t ask because they’re bound by a certain historical narrative that as an artist I am not bound by. So, I can ask different kinds of questions. What is it to collect an image of an African slave and put it on display in a city that’s eightthousand miles away from where it was originally created? And what is that to put it on display in a city that’s majority Latino? My work tries to make some of those questions visible or more visible.
The Profiled series was looking for what was missing. I photographed every portrait bust in the Getty collection as a way of thinking about racial representation in Los Angeles. One could certainly just look at the online catalog and print out a page for every sculpture and not need to photograph them. But for me, the meaning of the work is in the process of creating the work. First, getting access to the collection. Second, going there with my camera and photographing it, putting up lights, doing all the things that it takes to get a picture. And then in the end, having the knowledge of what’s there. That was partially performative for me. The idea and experience of spending all these days looking at these objects and trying to think about what they meant to me or didn’t mean to me. I mean they’re important works. I’m glad they have survived. I think maybe a little bit reminds me of all the other works that haven’t survived and are not being kept right now. I’m trying to find ways to share that perspective with people who don’t share my perspective, or for whom the questions never occurred. Even when they encounter the images, they’re unable to see the language at work, because the opacity of cultural difference. And the opacity of privilege. And all of these are linked to different forms of oppression.
GONZALES-DAY: So, privilege and oppression are interesting to me. And the things that one can find reflected in art museums. These are highly privileged works and what does that tell us. There’s a critique there but I feel like it’s not simply institutional critique of the museum. I’m trying to think about the larger question of what gets taught. Maybe thinking a little bit about museums as part of the educational system, not simply a standalone representative, because they’re based on scholarship and scholarship is what’s taught in schools. You can’t separate the museum from the university. And likewise, you can look at universities. Latinx professors are less than 5% in the state of California and less than 4% nationwide. In California we are literally a majority of the population. When you think about these kinds of histories from apartheid or histories of colonialism and the invisibility within let’s say the arts or within education, I mean how do we get people to think about those histories?
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