In the lead up to Mitchell Kehe’s solo exhibition “from pop songs to pig breeding” at Ginny on Frederick in London, the artist spoke to Minsuh Kang.

The following are excerpts from this conversation.

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Do you have an outline for the materials you are looking for or is it an instinctual process?

It’s both, it’s mostly intuitive. I’m drawn to certain things for sure. I’m not necessarily setting out with a plan but one has to make decisions along the way. There are usually a lot of different textures going on. I like to start with fabrics that might already have a texture and color, they feel like part of the world already compared to a blank canvas. Maybe I’ll find a fabric hanging around the studio that’s a bit dirty. It’s more of an arranging of a collection of materials and forms than a normal painting process. There needs to be something I’m reacting to.

I am always looking for forms, whether from my own life, interactions with materials or found objects or forms that resonate with me. There’s a work that’s up at Khoshbakht Galerie in Cologne right now in a group show. For me, it’s close to an ideal example of how I wish every work would come together. I found these flat objects on a walk near my studio. For me, they are almost perfect forms – not immediately identifiable, yet familiar and relatable. They have both hard straight edges and soft round edges. They are equal parts image and object, human and non-human. After some minor alterations, they quickly found their place at the bottom of this dark polyester I had stretched the day before. It was perfect because it happened with the least amount of my involvement. Which I don’t always know how to recreate. But that’s the goal.

Minsuh Kang: Is it about putting yourself in a position where coincidence can occur?

It’s often about trying to follow something that’s already happening, like with the fabric surface or forms I find. Starting off with something in an image or an architectural fixture or something from my pool of images, or from drawings. That’s the gap I like. The space between meanings. I have a lot of screenshots of forms I see in the background of films, like a chandelier behind another object. Maybe it’s the shadow of something.

I guess you’re looking for something unstable. And by putting it onto your painting you’re also making the structure of the objects unstable. For instance, if you look at an image of a chandelier, there’s a structure of value or attention, but then putting the “shadow” onto your canvas, you give value to something completely different.

Yeah, making that whole situation unstable, extracting the intended value and meaning, changing its context. Often, if we go back to talking about language, when it comes to language around paintings, I think that people, and I can too, have a really hard time accepting things for what they are. Always wondering about what else they are, what it is referring to or the name and value. I like the idea of things existing without names, even though it’s impossible.

So rather than the physical objects, like the chandelier, you’re interested in an object’s mutable state?

Yeah, a good word I learned for it is protean or maybe amoebic. Things that have a protean potential. The potential meaning in the shifts in-between things.

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There still seems to be a sense of structure or organisation to the work. Not only are you repeating the forms, there are material repetitions, and even small prints of your older work collaged into these new ones.

That’s what I meant by following things. I have a show coming up at Ginny on Frederick in London. The title is "from pop songs to pig breeding". It’s kind of a way of describing how humans make things, two ends of a spectrum and maybe an illusion of control or agency. I’ve inserted into some of the works printed photos of fragments of past works, mostly works that are now destroyed. In these new works they are like seeds planted, a way of following a lineage of forms and thought. Maybe not in a straight line but more of a spiral.

Is this what you’re alluding to with the wheels in your previous works?

Exactly. That’s a way of describing the process or how it happens for me.

Do things ever get recycled?

I think there are all these forms that stay with me, the wheels or amoeba-like forms. Sometimes they are hard to escape. So the recycling happens constantly but they are always shifting, never exactly the same. In different materials, contexts or different arrangements, in a sort of soup.

Do you ever react to other artists? Do fragments of other people’s works become seeds for your own work?

There are artists I like and am influenced by, of course, but no, not directly. I’m more likely to engage with the kind of forms we’ve been talking about, and sound and music are very important to me too. Maybe that’s another way to frame the things we’ve talked about. Music can exist on its own, it doesn’t need all the language around it. I sometimes wish that could be true of visual art.

What do you listen to whilst you paint?

Lately it's been kind of all over the place. Mica Levi, D’Angelo, Tirzah, Alice Coltrane, Neil Young, Johnnie Frierson, this Raphael Saadiq song, Still Ray, the tuba, it has a tuba solo, so good. The video is good too. Recently I’ve been watching a lot of  live footage of different things. There’s a good one of a Micachu and the shapes show. I especially like this one part of a 90’s No Doubt concert. It’s filmed so well. From the instruments, audience,  and every angle. There’s an opening shot of Gwen Stefani coming out of the dark.

Oh, that’s so funny! I also watched that video a couple of days ago.

No way! The one where she’s got a red top?

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Yes, the one with all these different camera angles, switching between the guitarist, her facial expression and audience. They even slowed down the footage in some parts.

And there’s this bit where she comes out of the dark. She comes out with her hair so crisp, the camera angle switches and she tilts the mic and the audience comes in.

Yes, her command of the audience is amazing. It’s almost this perfect film all these musical biopics are trying to capture.

Totally, I like these little moments. Of course, it’s so far from what I’m doing but somehow some of those things are more informative really.

When you’re reacting to these things, is there ever a sense of delay? Like there are all these things you surround yourself with and when the painting is finally made it’s all things of the past.

The times that are exciting to me are when it feels totally outside of my experience and spontaneous. I can try to put all the stuff into it, thinking it’s going to make sense, but when it becomes this other thing that I could’ve never imagined, that to me is when something starts to vibrate. If I can see all the things I was doing, it never works. It has to have its own brain. The fear is, can it happen again. It can be very frustrating. Sometimes I try to remake something and it has never worked. There are a lot of things that don’t work out.

I guess it’s about letting the paintings have goals outside of itself. How do you feel about the conditions in which the viewer comes to experience the work?

I definitely think about this. So I used to work on film productions, and once I worked on a job where the holding area, where we ate lunch, was in a church basement. It was also used as a soup kitchen sometimes, a community centre, a basketball court and sometimes normal church business. I really like these kinds of multi-use spaces.

Altering the light of a space is a more subtle way that I’ve tried to do this in shows. I don’t know if it’ll for sure happen yet, but for the Ginny show, I hope to build this grid on the ceiling that functions to defuse the light. I’m interested in not only making the space and light feel different but also having this imposing grid that the paintings could possibly challenge or react against.

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Is it setting a particular condition for a viewer, like at a concert?

I’ve always had an admiration for music and musicians, especially classically trained musicians.

What do you admire about them?

I think it’s the intimate knowledge of the instrument and being so practiced and precise, the discipline it takes, I just don’t have that. And just having this kind of relationship with an object that kind of musician has with their instrument.

There’s something special about how present a musician can be in both their body and art at the same time. How the work exists in their bodies. It’s a complete embodiment of their art. Whereas visual artists are faced with an object after the action is complete. It’s the result of something that ends up becoming the art.

Yeah, like the flutist’s body and flute almost become one. I was also thinking about the relationship between bells and organs of a body. How with the bell, the form is created by their function, but it’s also the form of the bell that makes their particular sound. There is a cyclical relationship between form and function, similar to a lung or the liver.

Definitely. Their coming of being and who they are exists in one another simultaneously. I think that makes complete sense with your work. How the paintings’ associations with form is made by repetition not only in one work but through many works and the forms become exhausted to a point where it also carries no meaning. The meaning is made by this exhaustion of the form.

I think so. Meaning becomes exhausted but shifts into a different kind of meaning. Language, forms, and materials exist, they can never be totally neutralized. They are impossible to completely escape, but I also just think living things are kind of at odds with absolutes.

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Mitchell Kehe (b. 1984) lives and works in Berlin, DE.

Minsuh Kang lives and works in Berlin, DE.

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