MIF 003: Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon

Christopher Schreck speaks with New York-based artists Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon about "Quaternion" (2024), a site-responsive installation of sculptural furniture works commissioned by the Marciano Art Foundation.

Transcript

Christopher Schreck: From Marta Los Angeles, this is Motion in Field, a series of conversations with contemporary artists about their most experimental, unconventional, and boundary pushing works. I'm Christopher Schreck. 

Today, we're joined by Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon, a team of New York-based artists whose namesake practice bridges the languages of furniture design, architecture, and sculpture, with industrial processes and unconventional materials reimagined into highly conceptual and occasionally functional works of art.

Kristen and Andrew's projects have taken a wide range of forms, from minimal lightworks to elaborate multi-media assemblages - but in 2024, they entered new territory with the unveiling. of “Quaternion,” a site-responsive installation currently on view at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. 

Comprised of 16 pieces of modular furniture, each carved from industrial-grade foam and overlaid with pigmented coating, “Quaternion” finds Wentrcek and Zebulon branching out from their usual methods in several notable ways - among them, the incorporation of outside collaborators; the potential for auditioned reproductions; and the active encouragement of audience participation. 

In this episode, Kristen and Andrew speak to the circumstances that led to this exciting new work, and how it confirms the material-driven experimentation that has long distinguished their output while also broadening the scope of their practice.

Thanks for listening.

To begin, I thought we could discuss how the exhibition's setting informed your decisions creatively. So, for listeners who may not be familiar, can you offer some quick context as to the Marciano's building and its history? 

Andrew Zebulon: Yeah. So, the building was built in the early 60s, I think, and was designed by Millard Sheets, who was an architect, a painter, and a teacher. I admittedly wasn't familiar with him at all before this project, but he designed it, and they built the building as a Masonic temple, with a huge theater where they would put on their secret Masonic rites and a huge ballroom on the top floor. That was the original purpose of the building. And then I guess, at some point, it fell into disrepair; I don't know that it was abandoned, but it was empty for a long time. Derelict, I think. And then the Marciano Foundation took it over seven or eight years ago and renovated it and turned it into their foundation space. 

CS: Yeah. It seems like a really interesting building. The marble interior is really beautiful. 

Kristen Wentrcek: It's amazing. 

CS: Yeah, but the exterior is monolithic and, from what I could tell, windowless. It feels willfully private or even secretive in its design. 

KW: Wow, I didn't even pick up on that while we were in there, but that totally makes sense. Yeah, it's really cavernous. 

AZ: Yeah. There are windows on the top floor, although for all I know they added those later when they renovated. But certainly, the ground floor, it’s true, there aren't any windows at all.

CS: It seemed like a good fit for you guys, just given the allusions you've made in the past to the structural language of spaces like sanitariums and bunkers. The Marciano Building itself feels in keeping. 

KW: Totally, yeah. 

CS: So the show is set in the building's library, which includes shelves of books and several pieces of artwork on permanent display. Your work seems to have been installed in ways that respond directly to the environment itself -  encouraging people to lounge and perhaps read as the Freemasons might have done - but I wonder if the designs themselves make any references to the space or to the Freemasons more generally?

KW: Yeah, we pulled images from old temples, but that furniture was pretty ornate, so we took symbols and stuff and started from that point of view versus trying to remake anything that would be in some of those buildings. In the photos that I found, it was a lot of turned wood and more ornate, and more set up like an auditorium or something - less so in the library, but I just mean Masonic furniture in general. So I think we kind of took more from the things that you would find like on, like, a freaky little hat that they have than the actual furniture. 

CS: Right, totally. The show itself was an institutional commission, right?

AW: Yeah. 

CS (2): Is it safe to assume that these new works were developed with this particular environment in mind? 

KW: Totally, totally. And we, we used a more of a commercial finish for these, too. I mean, I think all the finishes we use are technically commercial, but I think this one is pretty hardcore. So there were some changes that we made specifically for this project. 

CS: Yeah, speaking of finish: As far as your incorporation of this pigmented coating, was it intended as a means of fortifying the pieces to make them more durable and functional? Or was it more of an aesthetic decision? 

KW: Yeah, I mean, it reflects the finish that we've used in the past. I think that the material that we've worked with prior to that, the base is quite similar. Like, I think the chemistry is actually pretty similar, but it has more of a – I want to use a word like “leathery,” but it has less of a body to it. I would say this is like an eighth of an inch thick versus like a sixteenth, which actually ends up being quite different. It has more of a rubbery feel. But I think it's much better for this higher-traffic situation. The last thing you want is somebody calling you in the middle of the night being like, “Hey, there's a huge hole in this.” (laughs) So I think this is a good moment to like move into that space. I don't know. What do you think Andrew? 

AZ: Yeah, I was just going to say that, to some degree, I think it was kismet. We had used this coating a little bit in the past on another project, and we wanted to move more towards this coating with the foam pieces more generally, because we have real limitations as to what we can do with the other coatings, just because of the way it's applied, how you get it, who can apply it. We could have applied it ourselves, but I think to make a larger-scale project like this, and to make something that's more institutional and accessible, it made more sense to see if this coating would work. So, it was something we already wanted to do, and it seemed like this was an opportunity to kind of bring it together.

CS: The use of coating was also interesting to me specifically because it required you to work with an outside collaborator. My impression of your shared practice up to this point is that nearly everything has been done in-house, hands-on, built from scratch in the studio. So, in outsourcing this part of the fabrication, I wonder what your process with them looked like. Was it a simple outside service, where you brought in some specs and they executed? Or was it more collaborative, where there was a dialogue that led to this finished result? 

AZ: I mean, it’s not really collaborative in a creative sense. What's nice about working with these guys specifically is that they do work with other creative people and on creative projects.

KW: They actually do a lot of Hollywood stuff. 

AZ: Yeah. So they're less rigid than maybe some manufacturers in that sphere would be. If you're like, “Hey, we want to do this crazy thing,” they're like, “Okay, cool. Here’s how we could do that.”

CS: Yeah. 

KW: They're so specifically good, too, because so many manufacturers or fabricators will be like, “Oh, you don't want to do that.” There's a real hurdle you have to go through, where you're like, “Hey, I'm going to pay you anyway. Trust me, let's try this. It could be good for both of us: You’ll have a new technique in your repertoire and we’ll get to do something that's a little bit more interesting.” But these guys are pretty much game for anything.

AZ: Yeah. They’re just really great to work with. Like I said, they're game to entertain what you want to do, and then they can also say, “Well, your idea probably won't work, but this idea might work,” and it'll approximate what you're trying to do, which I think is cool 

CS: Yeah. You'd mentioned a moment ago that this was kind of kismet, in that it seemed like an ideal moment to move forward with this approach. Can you say a little more about that?

AZ: I think it’s a couple things, but the foam coating process specifically is really labor-intensive. Not so much the carving, which we're still doing - like, we did the carving of the pieces there at the at the Marciano show.

KW: Yeah, we did that in the garage on the floor. So, there’s still weirdly a lot of labor involved.

AZ: Yeah. But with the spray coating specifically, there’s fumes. It’s a little bit of a nasty process, and we're doing it in our studio space, which is very small. So, practically speaking, to have done these pieces that are up at the Marciano Foundation would have been really difficult, just logistically, not to mention it being hard on our brains and lungs. So we were looking for a way to continue to explore the foam stuff and see where it can go without doing all of that process ourselves, because it just seemed crazy, even for us. (laughs)

KW: Yeah. 

CS: Given the fact that this was a commissioned project, I wonder what kind of parameters you were working within as far as creative license. Were you given free reign or did you find yourselves working with the foundation to arrive at a mutually agreeable idea?

KW: We originally proposed something that was actually a little bit more curved. But I think with so many projects, it’s like, you've made something in the past, and when people talk to you, they envision their project in that same language.

AZ: Yeah. 

KW: I think we tried to shift it a little bit from the stuff we'd done, but I think it stayed quite elementally similar to previous work. We were trying to thread the needle with doing something a little bit different while also staying within that language that fulfills the expectations that the people asking you to do the project are trying to fulfill.

AZ: Yeah. In a way, it’s flattering when someone asks you to do something like this, because the reason they're asking you is that they've seen previous work and they have this vision. You don't want to be like, “I don't want to do that, because I already did that and I'm bored with it,” although sometimes it feels a little bit like that. 

One of the things that I thought was interesting about this project, which we hadn’t done quite this way before, was that as we developed some of the concepts and were passing drawings back and forth with the Marciano, one thing that they really wanted was for the room to feel open. So, we’re making these groupings and arrangements of furniture, and we ended up at this thing that's sort of an interconnected modular piece of furniture. That was something that came directly out of that back and forth. There are particular pieces in the set that are really only there as connectors, basically: the hexagonal pieces, the half-hexagon seats. Those came out of this idea, where it was like, “How do we interconnect all of this stuff?”

KW: Yeah. I mean, you can interpret “library” in a bunch of different ways. I was imagining kind of a cruise ship dining room - that's sort of the library I had in my mind. They wanted more interactivity, but when I think about a library, I'm like, “I'm not speaking to anybody for five hours.” That's the beauty of a library. But I think they were thinking of a library more as a meeting space. 

AZ: Yeah, or like a sitting room, or a conversation room, which is maybe closer to the Masonic lounge. But something else that we haven't really talked about is the coloring of the pieces and the carpet. The carpet coloring is a direct reference to the carpet that was in the room at some point, at least judging from a photo that we saw, and the coloring of the pieces themselves was meant to work in concert with the building and, in particular, with the mural that Sheets painted in that room. So, some of those more elemental references to the building are in there, too.

CS: Yeah, I was curious about this. Obviously, given the nature of the commission, the work is going to reference Freemasonry as well as the specific history of the building itself – but it seems like the inspirations for your collections tend to span across a range of cultural touch points, from film and fine art to broader ideas like surveillance and biomimetics. Kristen, you mentioned cruise ships, which is really interesting; were there other motifs or reference points at play with these new works beyond the Masonic histories? 

KW: Yeah, let's see. I think we had looked at Scarpa, the architect. 

CS: Oh, that's interesting.

KW: You know, there might actually be some sort of LA element to this that I hadn't even really thought about until now. I think a lot of these references we've used in other projects when we've been in LA. Scarpa used a lot of reliefs and openings and stuff, and I think the way that we carved these pieces relates to that. Like, some of the sofas would start as a block and then we’d take out like a huge mass of it and then leave some of it. So, there's some architecture there. I don't know, what else? 

CS: Well, based on the exhibition text, it sounded like you might have also been thinking about airports and how they function as liminal spaces.

KW: Yeah, actually, we have a lot of “liminal space” sort of things. I'm not sure why, but we always go back to that. It's sort of like an installation or something. Being able to create a portal in a building is always exciting and challenging. The Marciano’s space is actually so weird, in that the whole lobby and the theater zone all go together, they came from the same era, but the library is almost like an operating room or something. The walls are super white, the floor's concrete, the lighting is bright – it’s so bizarre. So, we already had a little bit of a portal setup, and it was just about adding some texture to that. 

CS: Generally speaking, how would you describe your process for developing new ideas and projects on a formal level? Are you sketching on paper, digitally modeling, material testing, building prototypes, maybe all of the above? 

KW: Yeah. I think we have it kind of nailed down at this point. It depends, in a way, because if we have to share with somebody, then we have to be able to translate it – versus, if it's internal, and we're just going to whip out eight stools, we don't really have to do as much documentation or whatever. But usually, my drawings are more architectural, and then Andrew weirdly does the SketchUp, which is the most architectural. But Andrew, I would say your sketches are actually quite loose when you do them by hand. 

AZ: Yeah. I'll usually start with some hand sketching, but it kind of depends. This project is a little different, because we were starting from a place where there’s a language and a materiality that's already established. When it began, we actually tried to go off far in one direction with this angular, curved, weird, almost Space Age-y stuff, and they were like, “That’s not really what we had in mind.” So then, once we figured out that they wanted something more like the elemental stuff we’d done before, it was a little easier to generate a bunch of stuff in SketchUp. But usually, as far as drawings, Kristen starts with a ruler, pen, and paper, and then I'm doing something much looser – but it’s not like they’re so artistic; they're just a bunch of iterations of shitty little sketches that help us start to generate ideas.

CS: When I first saw the title for the show, I thought it was a direct reference to 3D modeling. where “quaternion” speaks to the angular rotation of an object around an axis. Obviously, it turned out not to be the idea that you were referencing with that title, but it did make me wonder if modeling was part of the process.

KW: Yeah, we do use it. Sometimes it's misleading, though, so with a project like this, you have to figure out whether you want to share it or not. 3D modeling is so good for saying, “We're fitting it in this space. What does it actually look like?” I like to do a real model, too, but that's actually not even that accurate, whereas Andrew’s SketchUp documents allow you to be like, “Okay, how many inches do we have on this side actually?” Otherwise, you're recalculating it a hundred different times. 

AZ: Yeah. At least for me, SketchUp has become a bigger part of the process over the last couple of years, just as I've learned how to use it. The good thing about it is that you can do things very quickly. So, say we want to make a chair. It's very easy to crank out ten or twenty or fifty different versions of the chair, all at different heights, and you can start to play with that. It’s the same thing with laying things out in a space and getting a sense of how you might place the objects in a room. But the weird thing is that it probably also boxes in my thinking a little bit as I'm drawing stuff, because it's regimented in a way that paper is obviously not. So, it's strange how it must have an impact on what my actual ideas are. 

KW: Yeah. That's weird, actually. You kind of box yourself, but it allows you to whip out twenty versions in an hour, just like moving the arm around, and then you can say, “Okay, I think this kind of works.” But actually, do you feel like you start with SketchUp? Because typically, I don't want to talk about it until I'm ready, too. I'm actually a real bitch about it. (laughs) I'm like, “I don't want to know what you're thinking. Just let me come at it from my own point of view.” And then we’ll go to a bar and say, “Okay, this is what we're thinking,” and usually there's some overlap there. Then we’ll tweak it into something that makes sense and feels right. 

AZ: Yeah. 

KW: I'm always starting with some sort of library of images. What are you starting with? 

AZ: I think I'm starting with shapes. 

KW: Shapes, totally.

AZ: Or maybe the real starting point might be a material? I feel like you often come with some idea, like, “I think this material or this process is really intriguing. Is there something we could do with that?” It starts the ball rolling, and then you’ll start pulling together those visual references, and I’ll start thinking about the shapes of things or how we might apply this stuff in some vague way, because we don't necessarily always know how it's going to work or if we can even do it ourselves. Sometimes it all works together and sometimes it all falls apart. But broadly speaking, I think the working method we’ve defined over the years is that you start with visual stuff, I start with the same four shapes I'm always drawing, and eventually they come together into something. 

KW: That's true, you always end up repeating yourself. I have this weird app that nobody has ever heard of or uses, but I think it's the most genius thing ever. It's called Eagle.Cool. I’ll be like, “Andrew, check out these 500 images I pulled for this idea,” but it’s kind of the same thing for every project. And you're always like, “Check out this shape I want to do,” and I'm like, “Yeah, I know. I know what you want to do.” (laughs)

CS: So we have recurring shapes, but also recurring materials, insofar as you produced these latest works out of industrial grade foam, which is a medium you've returned to on several occasions in recent years. I'd be curious to hear a bit about what appeals to you about foam as a material and the unique opportunities and associations it might bring to your work. 

KW: I think we kind of fell into it. Why did we even start using that? Do you remember, Andrew? 

AZ: This is actually a good example of what I was just describing, because I feel like one day, you said, “Remember those karate helmets that were squishy but coated? I think we could do something cool with that.” That led us to medical and rehab equipment. At the same time, you were trying to figure out how they actually make it, and after a crazy hunt, you eventually found the right coating that we could apply to the foam, so then we made some weird sculptural pieces with that. And then we got asked to make a chair for a group show and we thought, “Oh, maybe we can use the foam.”

KW: Oh yeah, that was for the Friedman Benda thing. 

AZ: Yeah, exactly. So, in my mind, it was one of these things that often happens, where you were just like, “What about that thing? That’s sick.” In retrospect, it was maybe the least practical thing we could have chosen, but it has turned into something that people really respond to, maybe more so than any of the other materials we've worked with.

KW: Yeah. It’s one of those weird things you encounter when you’re six and you think, “This thing has changed my life. I don't know how, but I'm going to remember touching that karate pad.” Do you remember when someone would have a bike they would ride around, and it would have a gel seat? That's in the same like wheelhouse to me. It felt so weird, but you’d be like, “This is incredible.” I really feel like we’ll go back and use that at some point. 

I agree that a lot people do respond to the foam – but our general lack of success is due to the fact that we like to explore new materials, so you never become the master of any of them. I'm just interested in materials in general, so I'm not necessarily trying to do foam always and forever. I think a lot of artists and designers love to hone in on one thing, and that's what they do for the rest of their lives. I think we're quite the opposite of that.

AZ: That would be the smart thing to do. 

KW: (laughing) Yes, that would be the smart thing, the reasonable thing to do, but we like to blow a ton of money on getting new stuff and trying to figure out how to use it.

Having said that, in working with Marta, there’s something positive about building on the same language, and so that’s encouraged us to stick with this material and figure out the different ways we can use it. For example, before the “No Life” show that we did with them in 2023, we had always carved the foam pieces with hand saws - but with that project, we thought, “Why don't we use the capability of our foam guy who's in the Bronx?” With him, a lot of the foam is cut with a big guillotine. It’s imported in these huge blocks, maybe 96x48x40 or something, and then they’ll chop it. They’re mostly making upholstery cushions, so it's usually in iterations of squares, but they also have some older tools that they don't use that much. Nobody else cares about any of this stuff - but get a couple of freaks in the building, and he was like, “Hey, check this out.” Basically, it was like a bandsaw. Bandsaws are often vertical, but this was a horizontal bandsaw. You’d have a jig, and you’d run this bandsaw across the jig. 

AZ: Yeah. If you've seen the pieces from that show, they all have this ribbed cushioning. So, basically, for the jig, we cut a profile template out of Masonite with all the little bumps and warts on it, in actual size, and then he would take that, put it up against a square block of foam, and then run the saw along the template.

KW: Right. So, in that scenario, we were still using the same material, but because we’d stopped cutting it by hand, we were able to get a different effect, which is kind of nice. The point is that if you stick with a material for a while, sometimes you get to new stages with it. By focusing on a single material, you can develop it in new and interesting ways.

CS: That’s really interesting. With these pieces at the Marciano, there's a trompe l'oeil effect, where the pieces look almost like they're carved from blocks of concrete. You have this combination of smooth surfaces and more gnarly textures, which I gather were made by hand. I really enjoy that balance. 

KW: Do you mean the cutting or the spray texture? 

CS: The cutting. 

KW: Okay, cool. I was going to say, the spray texture is cool, too, because it’s still done by hand. So, you have the texture of the stuff that we carved, but then, on the flat surfaces, you also have the texture of the sprayer, who pulls the gun back as they're creating that Orange Peel effect. That’s done by hand, so it’s not really “manufactured.” You’re never going to get the same thing twice. You couldn’t take it to someone and say, “Hey, replicate this.” It would just be impossible.

CS: That actually brings up an interesting point: I was speaking with Benjamin [Critton] last week, and from what he said, my understanding is that unlike many of your pieces, which tend to be one-off, this new collection was conceived as a kind of “unique edition,” where the forms are able to be reproduced, but each individual piece is still unique by virtue of the manual elements of cutting and spraying that you just mentioned.

KW: Yeah, exactly. 

CS: And with that said, I wonder what it was about this collection that made editioning feel like the right fit, and whether it's something that you're hoping to explore further in the future?

AZ: Yeah. Benjamin [Critton] and Heidi [Korsavong] have been big believers in all of our insane shit, but especially in these foam pieces. They've been very steadfast around the idea that, positioned in the right way and shown to the right people, they could be very successful. So, doing them in editions is… I was going to say a “concession,” but that's not the right word, because it's not like we've been fighting this. We’re always very open to what they want to do. But I think working this way will hopefully helping them place the pieces. 

KW: Yeah. You run into this weird situation where it’s like, “We have the capability to do more quantity here, but they are going to be different.”

AZ: Well, that's the other thing I was going to say, is that there was a practical consideration with this, too, because with the previous foam stuff, we’d been coating all of the pieces ourselves. So, just the idea of having someone roll in off the street and be like, “Cool, I'll take ten of those,” actually seemed kind of scary.

KW: Nightmare.

AZ: I mean, it’s like, “Oh, boo-hoo, somebody wants to buy something.” But honestly, I don’t know if we would’ve even able to do that – whereas now that we've partnered with these people spraying, it seems much more viable. It's like, “Please, someone buy ten.” (laughs) The process is different, so the scalability has changed, even though we would still have that initial contact with the piece in terms of the cutting and carving. 

KW: Yeah. They still fall into this “strange furniture” category, the “sculptural furniture” category, because you can't really make them twice. They stay unique - but now you could do ten of them and not be crying yourself to sleep, preparing to do the project. It’s kind of a beautiful middle ground. 

CS: Well, in terms of bridging that gap between sculpture and furniture, another aspect of this new presentation that, in my mind, sets it apart from the other solo shows you've had in recent years is this negotiation of functionality.

With prior exhibitions like “Hog Trap” in 2021, you were making a point of presenting the pieces as wall-hung art objects - but even looking back at earlier collections of furniture, there would often be the suggestion of functionality, but there would be something about the materials themselves that would somehow preclude or dissuade people from actually using them.

KW: Totally. No, it's so, it's so true. 

CS: But here, you're actively encouraging visitors to engage with the pieces, to use them rather than simply admire them. I know your view on functionality has evolved a bit over the course of your collaboration; I'd be curious to hear where things stand at the moment and whether the functionality of these new works suggests a broader shift in approach.

KW: Ultimately, I don't even care. I like the beginning-to-delivery process, but once we’re finished, it’s like, “Whatever you want to do with it, go for it.” I mean, we have to incorporate some sort of guarantee of use, so that sort of part of the R&D, and there is a benefit to it being functional. I like that element of it - that it's not just a static object - but to me, it's never been a huge point of focus, and I'm not sure it is now, even though it's become more possible.

AZ: I would agree. I don't think this necessarily represents a larger shift. It might sound glib, but we don’t really think about it very much. I think it's more about the internal or external prompts. So, with “Hog Trap,” we started talking about what we might do for this show, and some of it was practical, where it was like, “Okay, the show's across the country, so what can we do that's not going to cost ten million dollars?” Actually, our first idea for that show was to make a bunch of Mylar sculptures and inflate them once we got there. We could just bring them all in a carry-on. That didn't really work - but then Kristen started talking about these homecoming mums, and it became about exploring that idea. So, it was us working with these other mitigating factors. 

Then, with the Marciano show, it was similar to Marta, where the Marciano had this pretty strong belief in this vision of ours, and in these things that we had done, but wanted to incorporate that into their space to serve a particular function. So, I think that’s an element, too, but I don't think we ever necessarily sit around and think too much about it too much. 

KW: Right. It's not necessarily democratic for us - it's more obsessive and demonic than being like, “I can't wait for somebody to engage with this.” It's like, “I don't know who's going to engage with it, and I’m not sure that I care.” (laughs) There’s just so many other logistical constraints already, and it never happens in a vacuum. I mean, maybe if you're a billionaire and you don't care if you never see any sort of ROI, or if you have a million dollars to ship it across the country, or if you were able spend 500,000 hours just playing with something for three years, it would be different. But realistically, there's always a series of constraints that help get you to something, which I quite like.

AZ: Yeah. Sometimes the constraint is just about us saying, “Well, if we're going to spend our time and money doing something, and we probably aren’t going to get a return on investment, then we might as well do whatever we want, and if someone else responds to it, that's cool. 

KW: Yeah. Working between art and design, you have to care a little bit, but we're not making products, really. You also have to make sure you don't just start a furniture company, where Marta's just the distributor. That’s not the point, either. But there is a reality to the system that we’re in, where there has to be some success to it. Otherwise, it must end. It's strange. 

CS: So, you've completed the new work, the show is up. As you enter the new year, what are your plans? What are you going to be focusing on? 

KW: With regards to Benjamin [Critton] and Heidi [Korsavong] from Marta, we want to work on some lighting, which I think we've always liked to do. It's interesting: When you make something once, you have one shot to do it right, and so a lot of times, the engineering is sort of botched. But I think we want to make a similar kind of “unique edition” with lighting, because you sort of need a few tries to get it right – nothing artistic, just figuring out where a screw hole is placed, things like that. It’s just about being able to deliver something that you feel really excited and confident about, something that’s clean and exactly what you want. So, I think we're going to do a “unique edition” of lighting with them.

We’ve also been working with fiberglass. We've done that in-house before, so we have a good understanding of that material, but now we're having somebody else do it, so they really can set it up and get those finishes really crisp and everything just right, and then make a series of those, too.

AZ: Yeah. Also, this past year, we tried to do more one-off releases. We tried to formalize it, so it's a little more structured than what we used to do, which was just randomly mix things and put them on Instagram. Now, we have a standalone website where people can go see those pieces, and it's just a way for us to do whatever we want, unlinked anything else in particular. So that's been fun, and I assume we’ll continue to do that.

KW: Yeah, I've been sitting on this box of coal for, like, three years —

AZ: More like eight years. (laughs) 

KW: OK, sorry. Like, thirteen years. But now that we’ve set up this website, I'm chomping at the bit to finish my work today, because I'm like, “I need to go get some materials so I can finally mess with this coal!” (laughs) We have all these little projects, where it’s like, “I have this box of coal. I can't wait to use it. I don't want to spend too much, and I'm not trying to pitch this as a big project for anything, because it's too crazy, but I do have the deep desire to mess with it.” So, I think that's something that website and say, “Okay, we made five of these, and that’s it.” 

AZ: Totally. And maybe, in the future, it'll serve as some kind of incubator. That's a horrible “tech” word to use, but maybe this place is where we might do something randomly for these releases and be like, “Actually, this is like something we could do in a larger scale, or with Marta on a future show.” I just think it's cool to have this setup, where it’s like, “I don't know what this is. I just want to do this weird thing and put it on the internet.” 

KW: Yeah, that’s really the fun part of it. It’s about getting into something new without having to fully commit and say, “This needs to go into a gallery show,” and then have to prepare it for the next six months. You get to exercise building stuff or understanding a new material. So, we have that as our outlet, almost like a lab, for things we might want to do in the future.

CS: Motion in field is presented by Marta Los Angeles and produced by Christopher Shrek Our theme music is by Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. You can read and listen to all of our conversations by subscribing to Marta's email newsletter via their website: Marta.la. Follow us on Instagram at @cdschreck and @marta.losangeles, and be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.