thomas houseago

walking

and
crawling
in
los
angeles.

Thomas Houseago: “My name is Thomas Houseago and I live and I work in Los Angeles. I’m in the Whitney Museum for the Biennial and we’ve just installed my piece here in the room so we’re still in the process, I guess, it’s still dirty, and things are still happening, and we’re not lit. I called the piece Baby because I had a very weird summer. There was enormous fires where I live up in the hills in Los Angeles. So as I was making this there was this volcanic kind of event going like on my doorstep and my wife was pregnant with what was to be my son was about to be born, and then simultaneously there was, in the studio where I was working, there was this explosion of violence – there was like a murder right outside my window. So this piece was this weird mixture of disaster and birth that was going on in my life and at the same time I was making this piece very conscious of my first sculpture ever going to New York City, which as a guy of my generation means something you know. We shipped it on a crate. They built the crate outside my studio. They had to build the crate outside the studio on my street, which is a fantastic thing because you had the shrine of the guy who was shot and the crate builders, it was like something from a Fellini movie, it was beautiful. And so they crated it on the street, in Los Angeles, with like thousands of people congregating like a music video or something and then they put the crate on the truck, drove it out here, and then, to my surprise and amazement it was already here in the room when we arrived."

.