#14th factory

The 14th Factory is a microcosm of a solution, or at least my incubating conceptual idea of one. It is an action, arriving in a community outside of the main Los Angeles tourist map, bringing a group of multi-disciplinary artists together to collaborate, re-activating an abandoned space, and then having it be accessed, shared and enjoyed by a diverse demographic outside of the established paradigm of art presentation. To me, that’s action whose result is ultimately shared by a greater community.

The 14th Factory explores an inherent tension between our need for borders, and dreams of living in a borderless world. It’s a theme that is at once universal but also highly topical. Today, wherever we happen to live in the world, we’re experiencing the painful breakdown of borders: with globalization, unemployment, mass migration... but we’re also witnessing resurgent nationalism and the violent re-imposition of borders with the building of walls and the securitization of frontiers.

The title of the project The 14th Factory speaks to this theme in different ways. It alludes on one level to the Thirteen Factories of Canton (today’s Guangzhou) in Southern China. This was a zone on the outskirts of the port-city where, through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, foreigners were permitted to trade for part of the year. Of course, the object of this trade was ultimately the opening up of China, imagined as a breaking down of borders in the name of free trade. Britain, and other powers, would go to war with the Qing Empire to ensure that it opened up. The Thirteen Factories becomes an emblem in this project of a contradictory impetus for lockdown and global expansion. Globalization, embedded in a one world vision, is often the result of violent intersections. The project explores this tension, between the border and the borderless.  

What do you hope Factory goers will glean from the experience of the work therein as well as the space?

I honestly just hope people will go and see it. After 5 years and countless failures, shut downs, walls and frustrations, I can barely believe it actually exists. I hope people feel a connection to the work in a way that it merges with them, the environment, the building and in turn, the neighborhood.

Our trade is art, love, inspiration, and the removal of borders within the walls of our factory/enclave, with easy access for all. Diverse, inclusive, The 14th Factory represents a thoroughfare of input and export both emotional and tangible. Hopefully we are an example of the benefits of globalization, this glowing, creative meteor, landing on to this ambiguous, transitional area of Lincoln Heights, with their permission and endorsement

But within the walls are warnings, reflections of the state of the contemporary, global landscape. Dark, explosive, massive sculptural masses, airplane parts disconnected from their host vehicle, luxury sports cars destroyed, hundreds of factory workers brawling. It’s no walk in the park…though admittedly we do have a park but even that, terra formed inside the factory, suggests the inevitable loss of our environment and the need to inhabit new ones artificially.

The 14th Factory is a place to reflect, enlighten and give hope through transformation.

Warhol’s Factory was a different time and intention and sense of fashion but equally offered a new paradigm in art presentation and production; the post-industrial process conceptually realized in art production. Our relationship with that piece of art history, I would suggest, is in terms of its relationship to the established art world rather than any parallels with ways of producing, delegating or collaborating. This is a different time, this is a different project, with a very different group of artists.

How do you think the city of Los Angeles contributes to the experience of the Factory?

The development of The 14th Factory has been an ongoing, evolutionary process. The concept has always been a kind of guerrilla action that would go in and transform and activate an underutilized or static urban space. In its initial stages four years ago, the idea was to go in and create an intervention in an abandoned building in Hong Kong, but as the project grew we were open to bringing it out into the world, wherever might seem a good fit. As an international project it could really go anywhere that made sense. We were offered an amazing empty heritage building in New York that we tried to make work but the environment and the situation just didn’t work out and we pulled out to look elsewhere. I have spent a lot of time in LA and have some really good mates here, a couple of them searched locations for me and when I saw this warehouse site in this ambiguous, transitional area of Lincoln Heights — it just felt right, and Los Angeles has a kind of open-mindedness and energy that makes sense for the project right now.

I see LA as a great city to initiate the project and I realize holding the show there, especially in Lincoln Heights, has improved the project and made it far more relevant. The neighborhood is now part of the project, the building and the work inside seems to seep out into the surrounding world.

When planning for New York, it was a very different neighborhood and set of parameters being on Wall Street in the old JP Morgan headquarters. That shift in location has had a dramatic effect on the show and it was adapted further with respect to that. It has a very different — and I would say more authentic — outcome. Less brazen and with the obvious complications of interpretation (being housed opposite Federal Hall and the NASDAQ), the project being in LA is allowed to breath on its content first, though the location is without doubt a brilliant collaborator. The space being an ex-Chinese import/export factory became the final piece in the puzzle.

How do you think the Factory's exhibitions and existence challenge the current political climate? How does it engage viewers towards critique? How does the work act as document?

Today, in an increasingly post-industrial world, the word “factory” is almost archaic. The 14th Factory speaks to the implications of this post-industrial world, a closing down, or obsolesce of one model of production that began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s not coincidental that the project is housed in an old commercial space in Lincoln Heights. The setting is part of its content.

The project invites you to think about different scales of border-making: the nation-state as a powerful container that draws lines around places; the borders that cities produce as the grow, enclaves of wealth and pockets of poverty; and meaning-making itself as a practice that involves taking the world and then framing it to make it intelligible. We cut our experience of the world up in language to make it understandable.

Value, in the art-world, is also often produced by imposing borders. The white cube is the ideal of a sequestered space, perhaps the ultimate enclave. It’s a space cut off from the world, but a space that paradoxically generates value in the world precisely by being removed from it. The 14th Factory asks: is it possible to re-imagine what art is and what art can do? Is it possible to free art from the constraints of the white cube? To free it from the “art world?”

How do ideas of theater and performance play into your curation?

I’m not sure I can separate out those ideas into any direct role or influence. Cinema, violence, music, labour and many other ideas play central roles in the creation of the 14th Factory and the interconnected nature of these relationships to the project make singling out elements problematic.

How did you move from painting to installation and curation? Do you believe the same themes to run throughout these different media? 

Painting is of primary importance for me. In a way, everything I do emanates from them. In fact my work in other media has developed naturally from my paintings. For example, I have been influenced to some degree by aspects of film in the way I build my canvases, so my work in film flowed out from there. The inherent tension throughout the exhibition is easily recognized and reflected in the twisting bodies in the paintings.

Do you feel that paintings maintain their influence when one has such technological spectacle at their disposal?

If the quality and relevance is present, then yes. They play an important conceptual role and the show doesn’t make sense without those works. They are a piece of the jigsaw, so not in competition.

Which works of art have had the most impact on you as an artist and a thinker?

I think I am a sponge for experiences whether it is absorbing the latest Grime music, losing it in clubs with Skepta and Stormzy blaring out of speakers, or fighting through mud in a Spartan race in Taiwan. I am perhaps a conduit for those experiences, gestating and transforming them into paint, steel and wood and film. 

These influences are apparent throughout my project and work in textures, sounds, colors, scale and materials. Punk rockers, science fiction, nature, violence, technology…it’s all in there, a lifetime of love, loss, fear, pain, hope, history, film, music, all digested and regurgitated.

The point is: it’s impossible to single out a specific work by any kind of artist as I am impacted regularly. 

How has curating the 14th Factory influenced the way you paint?

The project has made me re-approach painting, confused me, and I have yet to resolve that relationship and the transformation necessary to create a new body of work. Though for me the paintings, the body, the self, the frustration and tension portrayed in the body, are the roots of the project, I think in some ways I’ve failed to make the connection between the paintings and the rest of the works successful. It’s something I think about a lot moving forward. Paintings are made alone, intimately, and that’s a very different environment to crashing a Ferrari with 30 crew, lights, cameras, stunt men. So perhaps the paintings are the most unresolved part of the project even though they are the ignition point and incredibly necessary.

It’s also the space, presenting paintings in the simple white room is perhaps at odds with the more dynamic relationship between many of the other works and the building which seem to merge. We tried to solve this with some paintings hanging in different spaces but time was always against us.

So the curating of the project has elevated my vision for future work, but then that’s true of many parts of the project. It’s the best I could do with limited resources and time. But given another chance, I am quite sure I can improve, solve these issues, and deliver a far superior project. Always a work in progress!