(orchestral music)
- Hi everyone, welcome to the Cooking Show today.
- Thank you so much for joining me.
We'll be building, we'll be cooking,
and we'll be having a great time.
When I started making videos,
I was just watching on my downtime on YouTube,
a lot of aspirational media like cooking shows
and music videos and home improvement TV.
I was playing around with maybe the formal elements of how
the material world is shown inside of these things
that are halfway advertising and halfway instructional.
- Then I started to really think about the hosts
of these things, the perfection that is tempered with
this often sort of fake or performed vulnerability
where it seems like certain things that are probably
beyond most of our own grasp could be graspable or held.
We'll be right back.
(upbeat music)
I grew up in central Brooklyn.
I think I was a pretty sort of solitary kid.
I would spend a lot of time just kind of looking at things,
surfaces and the outsides of buildings,
sort of making up stories for myself.
So this is the house I grew up in.
We like to take a kind of laissez-faire approach
to the front lawn.
I was doing a lot of things that would sort of seem like
art or felt like art from a pretty young age.
It was like the space where the world made sense for me.
This one is like a Halloween,
I think I was a dead house wife,
that's what I said I was that year.
- Even at this age, she was stubborn,
she kind of knew what she wanted to do.
She had her own mind.
(upbeat music)
- Early on actually, I had called myself a painter.
And I think really what attracted me to that
was like paint itself.
The sort of alchemical magical way colors came together
on the surface of a canvas.
And I realized that like state of becoming
was what was really exciting to me.
That's how I started making video, actually was sort of
recording myself in the process of making paintings
and then remixing that
or reediting that later on to share
what I really cared about with other people.
(upbeat music)
And then that evolved into sculptures and installations
to sort of house and recontextualize those moving images.
(upbeat music)
Oh look, here's you with your beautiful face mask.
- If my kids ask me to go to the moon with them,
I'm gonna try to go there.
You know, I'm learning, she's teaching me.
And that's what artists do, they enlighten us
because they see things on a subconscious level.
- I knew that my mom was such a ham.
I never saw her actually cooking food in the kitchen
when we were growing up, but we had these long mirrors
in front of the kitchen and she would do these sort of like
fake Julia Child's performances for herself
and maybe like burn a piece of toast and then walk away.
- Today I'll be showing you my daily clean beauty routine.
This one is so much fun to use.
I'm going to show you how to make this.
- So it felt really natural to sort of invite her
into my process in that way.
- It smells like Cheetos.
- I do like to kind of operate in this space
where the videos at first look like something
you're really familiar with, and then I start to
insert these uncomfortable things,
maybe these uncomfortable truths into a familiar form,
and then sort of see what happens
when that friction comes up.
- I think a lot of these themes
that I think about like aspiration
and how we try to seek control over our lives,
they come so much to the forefront in this space of wellness
and wellness culture.
And our bodies are obviously the site where so many
of these things really play out.
In 2019, that company, Mirror, started doing a lot of ads
on the subway.
You could have this instructor beam straight into your room
and it could look like high-end design
and they could be kind of coaxing you out
of whatever into exercising.
And so I just wanted to try to make my own
and see what would happen.
(downbeat music)
I thought about them kind of like haunted medicine cabinets.
Rather than giving you clear instruction
about how to work out or what the weather is like,
they're just as much sort of asking you for instruction
or giving confounding advice
or they're playing CAPTCHA tests
and maybe wanting you to help them out with them.
(downbeat music)
I called the piece Needy Machines in that way
because I thought of these objects as sort of needy.
But also wondering within this space, especially the space
of the bathroom, if we are needy machines somehow.
I think it's also a friction I'm living
with constantly, right?
And I think we all are.
Between the sort of space of fantasy we want to live in
and then the truth that we kind of know
even in an embodied way
about the instability of everything.
(downbeat music)