Episode 064 Nikita Gale

Show Notes

This month we’re in the studio visiting with contemporary artist Nikita Gale. Gale's work employs objects and materials like barricades, concrete, microphone stands, and spotlights to address the ways in which space and sound are politicized. Last year in episode 32 we visited with gallerist Ebony L. Haynes, director of 52 Walker, and it was in preparing for that conversation that I visited the gallery, and had the treat of seeing Nikita Gale’s work in person for the first time in the exhibition titled End of Subject. I wasn’t really sure what to expect as the documentation online was deliciously cryptic — installation views showed a space sparsely populated by metal panels on the wall, and on the floor numerous sets of metal bleachers that appeared to have been crushed, thrown on their sides, spotlights strewn about the room, and wires — lots and lots of wires everywhere. With the beautiful wooden floors and opens space of the gallery, it looked as though a dance piece or some performance art had gone horribly wrong. This was all I knew, as well as the fact that there was some kind of sound element to the piece. When I arrived, the gallery looked just as it did in the photos online, but there was no sound. I was tiptoeing through the empty gallery, when suddenly the whole space sprung to life — voices erupted through the space, and the previously inert spotlights began to dance around the room. Over the course of several minutes I witnessed an incredible choreography of sound and light, until silence and stillness eventually returned to the room for an extended period of time before a new score and choreography eventually emerged. I sat in the room for an hour watching people come and go — some visitors who missed the performance entirely, some who only saw one or the other. It was incredible to see the space repeatedly transform from a spectacle, to a space where the viewers themselves became the performance. Being a conservation nerd of course my mind went directly to wondering how in the world a piece like this might be documented and migrated through generations of technology over decades, and I knew I just had to have the artist on the show to find out. Tune in to hear Nikita’s story.

Links from the conversation with Nikita
> https://www.nikitagale.com
> https://www.52walker.com/exhibitions/nikita-gale-end-of-subject

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Cass: From Small Data Industries this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Cass Fino-Radin. And, and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. And today we are in the studio visiting with an artist. 

[00:00:16] Nikita: Hi, my name's Nikita Gale and I'm a Gemini rising. 

[00:00:21] Cass: Last year in episode 32, we visited with gallerist Ebony L. Haynes, director of 52 Walker. And it was in preparing for that conversation that I visited the gallery and had the treat of seeing Nikita Gale's work in person for the first time in the exhibition titled End of Subject. And I wasn't really sure what to expect in visiting the show as the documentation online was deliciously cryptic installation views showed a space that was sparsely populated by metal panels on the wall and on floor, numerous sets of metal bleachers that appeared to have been crushed and thrown on their sides and there were spotlights strewn around the room and wires, lots and lots of wires everywhere. With the beautiful wooden floors and the open space of the gallery. It looked as though a dance or a performance piece of some kind had gone horribly wrong. This was really all I knew as well as the fact that there was some kind of sound element to the piece. When I arrived, the gallery looked just as it did in the photos online. But there was no sound. So I was tiptoeing through the empty gallery when suddenly the whole space sprung to life. Voices erupted through the space and the previously inert spotlights began to dance around the room. And over the course of several minutes, I witnessed an incredible choreography of sound and light until silence and stillness eventually returned to the room for an extended period of time before a new score and choreography eventually emerged. And I sat in that gallery for, well over an hour, watching people come and go and some visitors missed the performance entirely. And there were others who would see one performance, but miss the other ones. And it was just incredible to see the space repeatedly transform from a spectacle to a space where the viewers themselves sort of became the activation and the performance itself. And being a conservation nerd of course, my mind went directly to wondering how in the world, a piece like this might be documented and migrated through generations of technology over decades. And I knew I just had to have the artist on the show to find out. We cover so much ground in this chat, tracing Nikita's path and artistic evolution over the years, all the way up to the present. It was just such a treat to sit down with Nikita Gale. Today's episode and the many more artists interviews coming your way this year, was made possible thanks to the generous support from the wonderful folks at the Kramlich Art Foundation and now without further delay, let's dive in to this week's chat with Nikita Gale. 

[00:02:56] Nikita: I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. My dad was in the Air Force, so we moved around a lot when I was younger. My mom was a piano teacher, There was always a piano in the house, like one of those upright pianos. my dad, when I was younger, he was working as a civil engineer in the Air Force, so he was building very boring buildings and infrastructure, like dams and bridges and those kinds of things. So there are always these little models of things in the house, like those little foam core models that architects make. And I remember like little exacto knives and those really cool architectural rulers that are three-sided. there was always a lot of music in our house. We lived in New Jersey for two years and then we moved back to Alaska and we're in Fairbanks, Alaska. And then we lived in this small town called North Pole, Alaska, which is where the Santa Claus house is. It's where Santa Lives. when I was nine, we moved to Georgia and then I pretty much grew up, spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years in Atlanta, or I should say a suburb of Atlanta in Gwinnett County. Elementary school, always into art. I was always like drawing, making weird stuff. I really liked taking electronics apart and putting them back together. That was a really big pastime for me is just taking things apart and putting them back together and drawing and painting, being really into art school, art classes.

 Then, the end of high school rolls around and I'm still really into art. It's like my favorite thing. I'm also a very good student in high school. I eat lunch in one of the classrooms with my teacher because I can't deal with the anxiety of having to find a table to sit at in the cafeteria. But at the same time, I'm like the homecoming queen, which is always a really funny thing I like to mention cuz I feel like I'm the furthest thing from a homecoming queen now , but it's just hilarious to me. But anyway, it's like high school's happening. College is on the horizon and I just don't feel like studying art or majoring in art is even a possibility. my exposure to fine art at that point, like in high school, there's this Noguchi playscape in Piedmont Park and my mom would take my brother and me there like every other weekend. I had no idea who Noguchi was or even what that playground was, but I just knew it was really cool. There was just like this ongoing curiosity and interest in at that point, paleontology, which then turned into an interest in archeology. Like a lot of the paleontology interests came from just watching like Jurassic Park and playing a lot of Tomb Raider. That's where the archeology came in. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. So I'm like playing these video games, getting really into archeology, and then I have to apply to college and I'm not totally sure what I wanna do, but the art thing feels less and less like a realistic decision to make. Also, my family's not wealthy like I don't have all these resources to fall back on if things don't work out or if I don't, study something serious. I went into school feeling like, okay, I need to study something that kind of makes sense where I can support myself. I applied to a couple colleges. I got into Yale and I decide to study archeology. I end up working with and meeting some really incredible people there. I studied under this archeologist, he's a Mayanonologist named Marchello Canuto. But I also started to get really into ancient Chinese archeology. I was studying with this professor Lillian Singh. 

My junior year, I decide I'm gonna take some women's studies courses and some anthropology courses, and I end up taking classes with Hazel Carby, who's like renowned Black British feminist scholar. And Kelly Jones, who is a renowned Black American art historian a lot of the course material was contemporary art, I was exposed very suddenly to all of this incredible artwork that I just did not know existed. It really shifted my understanding of what art was or what art could be and how art could be defined. after my junior year, I had one semester left of school and I decided to change my major from archeology to anthropology because I wanted to write a thesis that was more art, historical and incorporated a lot more like contemporary media and artworks. I graduated in 2006 and I recently like reread parts of this thesis and I was like, wow, I've really been pretty much thinking about the same thing for 16 years . I feel like sometimes when you're in thick of it, you're just like, none of this is consistent. Does any of this make sense? How is this related to this thing? And so sometimes it's really nice to encounter these really early things that you were doing, just to have the reassurance that you are in fact pretty consistent, for better, for worse. And so when I move back home to Atlanta, I get a job. I start working in. At first, I started working as a headhunter, and it paid really well for like straight out of school. And I was like well, I need money. and I did that for like a year and a half. And then the recession hit, this is 2008, so I get laid off. But I ended up getting this job at an internet startup company as their advertising coordinator. And over the course of four years, I work my way up to director of advertising. And then at night I am going out to music shows in Atlanta and photographing, documenting everything. So all of my friends at this point are just musicians. I'm just like really deeply embedded in the music scene in Atlanta. And at this point 2008 to like 2012 ish there are really cool, weird, interesting things happening genre wise with a kind of music that Black artists are making. Miss Jack Davy and Brook Delo, who's a producer, they're just making this music it's very difficult for me to describe it, but it's kinda like, spacey alt grungy, it's really cool. This was the kind of music scene that was really my family when I was in Atlanta. So I have like thousands of photos just documenting like, them going into the studio to record them playing shows, house parties, all that stuff. That was just what I was doing. I was just obsessively documenting things. There's something really nice about still being a part of the community or part of the conversation, but not having to be the one who's performing not having to be the one who is being looked at or observed expending a certain type of energy to just work. I really am very sensitive to what kinds of images of me circulate online. That relationship I think to just like visibility and performance has always been a really important consideration for me in my work. 

[00:11:33] Cass: How does young Nikita Gale go from, this background in anthropology and being an advertising director and a passionate photographer on the scene in Atlanta. How do we get from that to International Art Superstar?

[00:11:55] Nikita: Wait, how did that happen? You know what I was like, I don't wanna photograph people anymore. I was coming up with these concepts for my friends, for like their album covers and press shoots, and coming up with these concepts is really fun. I don't necessarily need people to do that. What if I just photographed like, landscapes or objects? And so I started doing that for a couple months and I applied to a residency in upstate New York. And I got in having absolutely zero understanding of what any of this ecosystem of art was really about, I met some really incredible people. Ariel Shanberg, who was the director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock at the time, was a really amazing mentor and I learned a lot from him. He exposed me to some very cool photo books. That's the first time that I saw my friend Paul Sepuya's work. Paul had done the residency like the year before, I think, and he'd made this really amazing zine and I was like, oh, this is very cool. It was a very eye-opening experience for me. I learned a lot And so I applied for the studio residency at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, which is this nonprofit art space that has a studio program. It was the first time I'd ever had a studio space. Prior to that, I was just using my mom's basement as a studio. I was just so obsessed with making stuff. I had this day job and as soon as I finished the day job, I would just go to the studio and sometimes I would sleep there. I just kept compulsively making work. Like I started dabbling in video, started playing around with sculpture. I was doing a lot of work, like text-based work, kinda like concrete poetry, sort of like Christopher Wool kind of stencil stuff. This was also turning point where I started to lose touch with a lot of my music friends and was being exposed to more like studio artists. I get the studio in 2011. I'm starting to do shows here and there. And then two years later I started applying to grad school. Because I was noticing, I Seems like a lot of the people who are getting these things have master's degrees in art, which is never something that I really intended to do. but at the same time, I had never gone to art school, so I didn't have that experience that some people get an undergrad of going to art school, studying with artists who are your professors doing like a really long-term residency or something like that. And so I decided 2013 to apply to grad school.

Craig Drennan, who at the time was like a dean at Skowhegan School of Painting in Sculpture, he gave me some really good advice, which was like, think about going to grad school in a place where you might wanna live after. And I was like, okay. And he's like, UCLA's a really great program. There's a lot of really incredible people in that program. It's a special place. I went to grad school, moved to LA. I'm just like, again, obsessively working. I'm just so excited to be back in school to have, professors in this really amazing cohort and I made some of my best friends there. Finished school. I got this little grant. This is the stuff that, like when grad students ask me about what is life like after grad school? wish I had had access to this information, it might have been easier, not even like easier in terms of having a game plan, but just easier in feeling less alone or isolated in what is often a very stressful, anxiety ridden experience if you don't have galleries trying to sell the work, straight off the walls of your studio. But you have to be honest with people and say like, a good amount of it is just being in the right place at the right time. Some of it's luck, a lot of it's like being prepared and like relationships. A lot of it's preparation and just like showing up to things sometimes. Ultimately any institution is just the sum of the relationships within it. And there are many art worlds, but I don't think those worlds are any different than any other kind of institution.

When I was finished finishing grad school, I got this grant UCLA near the end of the year around graduation, they would grant one graduating grad student, like a $10,000 check, no strings attached just to like help you on your way out. I got that grant I had some time to reflect and really get centered in terms of what I wanted out of my studio practice. I had a studio that I had gotten with my friend, Paul Sepuya. It's probably like 1100 square feet that we split between the two of us. At the studio where I was so paralyzed and exhausted from grad school, I don't think I made work for like, almost a year. And then I like started to run out of money. I was like, am I gonna stay in this three bedroom apartment that I share with two friends and I'm paying like 750 a month for, or I'm gonna get rid of the studio. And I was like there's no way I'm getting rid of the studio. That's not an option. So then I moved out of this apartment and like lived in my studio for four months. And then I eventually like, got another grant, I got a Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant. It was another 10 K. So then I was able to like get an apartment and work a little bit more. And then I got a job working as an AV tech at the Natural History Museum Los Angeles.

That job was like the perfect combination of my skills and interests in archeology and all of this tech and AV stuff that's now like a very huge part of the work that I make now. This is a piece of advice for younger artists and students listening to this podcast.  If you have to get a day job, try to make it something that one is an opportunity for you build some kind of skills or do something that feels like it's adding to your practice in some way. And two, try to get a job that you don't have to take home with you. Try to avoid those jobs if possible. It's like getting that job in the Natural History Museum was great because when I left I was unreachable. There was not, there was no part of that job that I had to take home with me. I feel like that was a really big part of why I was able to like really focus and keep working on my own work while I had that job. Because it was five days a week full-time. And I eventually went down to four days a week and as things started to get busier for me in my practice it eventually went down to like very part-time until I just wasn't working there anymore. I met some really amazing people there too. There's a very funny through line in that AV department. A number of LA artists have worked at the Natural History Museum and there are a number of very amazing sound artists who've worked at the Natural History Museum as well. There's a lot of Cal Arts people over there. 

[00:20:16] Cass: So I'm curious to pick the thread back up with your work, because I feel like when we last checked in, you were a photographer,

[00:20:25] Nikita: Yeah.

[00:20:26] Cass: And then you go through your your program. program 

[00:20:28] Nikita: mm-hmm. 

[00:20:28] Cass: Fast forward to today, and I mean your work has just over, a relatively short amount of time really evolved into these incredibly ambitious, large scale installations with sound and light and kinetics. How did that happen? 

[00:20:50] Nikita: I would have to say, I'd have to point back to relationships, when I was in that like really fallow period right after grad school in my studio, I had a studio visit with Kibum Kim, who at the time was running his space in Frogtown called Skibum MacArthur.

Kibum is now a director at Commonwealth and Council, which is the gallery that represents me in Los Angeles. We had a studio visit, it must have been like 20 16, 20 17, We kept in touch and then two years later I was in, made in LA at the Hammer, which was the result of having met Erin Christovale who was one of the curators there, when I was in grad school. I think Erin saw my thesis show in 2016. It's these relationships that reemerge in ways that you can't always anticipate. To talk about the 52 Walker Show, cuz I know Ebony's been a previous guest on this show, Ebony and I met in I think 20 17, Ebony had seen my very first solo show in New York, which is at 56 Henry run by Ellie Rines in Chinatown. And there was this really weird little sculpture that I'd made that was like a piece of pink foam with an image printed on it. And it was wrapped around this like metal armature. Ebony saw the work and was really into it and came out to LA to visit me at my studio and we've been friends ever since. It was just like one of those things where she came to the studio and like within five minutes we're speaking the same language. And then Ebony put me in a two person show with this artist, Pat O'Neil when Ebony was working at Martos Gallery this early 2019. And things really accelerated pretty quickly, I would say from like 2018 made in LA to now, which I can't believe has only been four years.

[00:22:56] Cass: Let's talk about that show at 52 Walker. I first encountered your work at 52 Walker and this is specifically your installation, End of Subject. And I was just speechless. because I, I had no idea what to expect. I don't think there was any video documentation or anything online. I knew I was waiting for the piece to begin, meandering through the space, enjoying the sculptures and the pieces on the wall. So when it began, I think I gasped. For people who didn't get a chance to see that show I was hoping you could take us on a little virtual walkthrough of the installation, 

[00:23:33] Nikita: I wanna be very careful with how I described this, because a part of the experience of that work it's colored by when you enter and when you exit the space. It sounds to me like you entered the space when the lights were static, when it was just kind of lit like a gallery. I'm going to use your experience to kind of walk people through it. When you enter the space, the work is static, it's just. Static sculptures. there's a set of six bleachers some of which had been crushed by an unidentified kind of force. They seem to have been crushed by like downward force, maybe some kind of upwards force. Some of them are flipped over. There are one or two sets that seem like you could sit on them. And then there are about 20 lights, like moving headlights static and in position. And then along the walls there are six aluminum wall works that are etched with lots of different words, but they're all words that might be used to describe a body or a person, but the words operate along this spectrum. When I think of like what that spectrum might be, I think of it as body and flesh being on one end of the spectrum. And then like the most, particular specific ways of describing like the qualities of a person or when you imagine a person as a subject, like what are the qualities that you might use to describe them? I call those works body prints. Like I was thinking about David Hammon's body prints of him, using his body to create these indexes on surfaces. But instead of using my body, I'm just using words or terms that might be used to describe a person Then there's the sound work. I think of it almost as a kind of performance. And the work is extremely long. So there are very long silences of anywhere from five to seven minutes where just looks like nothing's happening. And then every five to seven minutes, there's like a vignette that starts playing, that lasts usually between like two to five minutes. The entire duration of that work, including the silences, is about two and a half hours. the intention is not for anyone to ever sit through that entire duration. there were a couple like hardcore fans, who like sat through the whole thing. But the intention is really to kind of come in, have a certain experience with some parts of the work and then leave. One of my fantasies about the work is that, two people who go into the space at different times, different days, and then they're like hanging out at dinner or having coffee and they're talking about the show and it feels like they're just talking about two totally different shows. A lot of when I was thinking about was largely centered around attention and thinking about attention as, an element in the work. Because these like silences and the pauses really like brush up against the boundary or the tolerance at least that I have for something not happening when you know that you're expecting something to happen. That felt like just a formal strategy that I was really interested in playing around with. Attention and also duration, because all artworks have durations, whether it's a painting where the duration is really determined by how much time you're willing to spend with it and look at it. A sculpture of course, moving image works and sound works often have a predetermined duration. But this was also something I was thinking about, just like the duration of a work. Another thing I was thinking about is just like thinking of an exhibition space in the way that it performs as like a static commercial gallery where you just look at things on the wall. Or is it a space where things are constantly happening, like there it's a video work or it's like an installation work that's constantly looping. There were a lot of things that I was just kind of like thinking through in that show. I almost think of it as like an attention workout that happens where I'm just like, I wanna create almost like an exercise routine or something where you're just constantly working out the different levels of attention that you have at your disposal. Because I feel like throughout the day, our minds are shifting between so many different kinds of attention that we have to pay to things. There's just like ambient awareness and then like very specific focused types of attention.

There's actually this book by this writer, Jenny Odell, called How To Do Nothing. It turned out to be like a really striking study in not just like attention in how it operates and thinking of it like a very important feature just to like, how human minds work. But also she talks a lot about artworks, which I was not expecting. I didn't realize it was like an art book. But there's this idea pretty early on that she introduces about attention holding architectures or intention holding infrastructure, that term really stuck with me because I was like, yeah, a lot of this work is really about unpacking what kinds of infrastructures or architectures encountering just on a daily basis that are really structuring and choreographing and determining what kinds of structures make some things easier to pay attention to than others. I don't know, thinking about infrastructure and architecture in that way also extends itself to just like how we think about ourselves and others because we're just a part of whatever that system is, with the show, like end of subject, what I am thinking through a lot is just In a very simple gesture with crushing the bleachers, removing the position of like a neutral viewer from the equation. I mean, you can't really sit this one out, So you're always inside of the work and implicated in it in some way because especially if someone else is in the room with you, it's like you become a part of that image for that person. And this is just the architecture of arenas and those kinds of things. It's like often I go to a lot of pop shows and so often it's like you're seeing the performer, but you're also seeing the other people in the audience with you witnessing the performance. And so it's like that idea of knowing that you're not just looking, you're also like a part of an image that's being created for others.

One of the really exciting things about being able to work at larger scales is that I get to work with people who I really respect and admire. It's not that I just get to work with them, it's like I get to like pay them. And so I have to also mention the incredible lighting designer I work with Josephine Wong, who I met when we were both working at the Natural History Museum. Josephine's just like a totally brilliant, incredible lighting designer there's like a recurring theme that plays usually at the beginning or the end of each of those vignettes. Something that just kind of brings you back into the room in a way. It was composed by Tashi Wada, who is a really incredible musician and composer based in LA and also Daniel Neuman, who's an incredible audio engineer.

[00:32:12] Cass: I just couldn't help but stop wondering with a piece like that which is programmed, using of course, like proprietary theater, lighting systems, and all of these things that of course won't last forever. Do you have some kind of choreography for the piece that you either started with or you created after the fact?

[00:32:36] Nikita: That's a really great question. So the way that I usually work with the lighting design specifically, because with the sound, the audio comes and then the lighting comes next. But I'm usually thinking about the lighting as I'm editing or working on the audio. And I'll create these sort of like rudimentary timelines when certain things happen in the audio, the light should do this or something should happen with the lighting here, there. for end of subject, I had the sound piece and then I worked with Daniel Neuman the audio engineer and Josephine on putting together a multi-track file we used a program called Reaper, which is really great for looping audio I think you can play video through it as well and sending like midi commands to a lighting program. We were able to, very precisely to the millisecond, make the lights do something at the exact moment that something happened with the sound. From a conservation standpoint when a work like this is acquired sometimes we use different software depending on what it calls for, but with an acquisition or any document that accompanies the work, when it's reinstalled, there's the actual file that is run by the software and then there's either like a zip version of the software that comes along with that, or very detailed instructions on like how to download that stuff. The install documents for a lot of these projects are really intense, but they're extremely necessary. And this is another thing just to go back to the tip about try to find a job that might, help you build your skills for your studio tip. When I worked at the Natural History Museum, there are very complicated show control systems in museums of that scale. And one thing that's part of your job is having to very carefully document how those systems work so that when some other tech has to come and fix something like five to 10 years from now, they know how to do it. Because I've worked on, the museum installation side, it makes it much easier for me to understand how shitty it is to like not do that stuff you know, or like how much more difficult you're making someone else's job When you don't have those documents or it's not as straightforward. And also, I don't wanna make more work for myself later when that work has to be reinstalled 

[00:35:38] Cass: I'm curious, have you had the delightful pleasure of dealing with an institutional acquisition where they have a time-based media conservator on staff? 

[00:35:45] Nikita: Yeah. They're like, thank you. And also the level of detail. Cuz sometimes there were things it's like, oh I didn't think of that. But yeah, this would be the way that we would do that and just fill in the blanks. But it's also helpful to like, have those experiences cuz every institution seems to have like different documents and things, I borrow from those documents and then I have my own. I've had some very great conversations and interactions like recently with some institutions that have acquired some more complicated, Private Dancer work, which is like lights and it's max m s p. So it's not, I shouldn't say it's not rocket science because it's fairly complex But it's not like multiple different programs running. It's one program. People who actually want to have conversations and really understand the work is incredibly important. But then in the instances where that may not be the case, I also issue these separate installation documents just directly from my studio. They're like technical installation guides. So it's like, here's a, detailed image of this thing. This is how this connects to this, this is what this means. So there's all these ways of just making sure it feels a little bit more like a conversation or I want it to feel like I'm just talking to you and explaining how everything works. 

[00:37:17] Cass: I am really curious with your, kinetic and sound and light installations. When I was experiencing it, it feels like performance. And I found myself thinking about performance art documentation and how that practice of, how choreographers and dancers train, authorized people to teach pieces and how that's become increasingly a practice even in institutions. I'm curious how you think about documentation of your work in that sense? 

[00:37:53] Nikita: Yeah. This is a great question because I recognize that from the start, that by making work that relies on any kind of software or like hardware to run, that it will eventually need to be updated. And this is also coming from someone who, like in the Natural History Museum, you literally have like another layer in the museum that's just like the most ancient technology ever that's still running a lot of the stuff. Percy the Pelican bird Hall, it's like running on the oldest computer. But yeah, this is something I think about a lot and one of the things about the work that I'm not super precious about is like iterations of the work. We run into issues basically when like money comes into the frame, let's be real. When there are questions around What edition is this? How many are there, will this be infinitely repeatable? Or is this like a singular work? Is this the same work? If it's a different technology, if the timing's slightly different? It's those kinds of questions that I don't necessarily have good answers for some of that stuff, but in other ways because the technology in some ways also has like infinite possibilities of how this work could shift or be reinstalled. It's fun to be grappling with that as I'm working on these projects. Like I have this work called Drummer. Every time it's installed it's a completely different setup. It's essentially this like fountain, it's like this work with water that's just like playing this drum set. It's like a droning drum set. A part of the conversations that I have with every exhibitions and conservation team at the various museums and spaces where it's been installed is like you really have to just adjust it to the space and adjust it to like the capabilities of the exhibitions team as well. It's like cooperative and there's a level of improvisation on the part of just the people installing the work. It becomes this really fun way of engaging more deeply with, people who are installing the work at the museum. 

[00:40:24] Cass: Nikita, you clearly have a deep connection with music and it's so cool now to hear where a lot of that comes from over the years. I'm just curious, what are you listening to these days?

[00:40:38] Nikita: Oh my gosh. I'm gonna keep it real. So I recently got my like 2022 most listened track list. I'm gonna give you the top five. 

[00:40:49] Cass: Nice. 

[00:40:50] Nikita: All right. Number one, airplane cabin white noise, number two. Brown noise. Oh my God. All right. Constant repeat by Charlie Xcx. Ocean Waves for Sleep, And number five, lightning by Charlie Xyx. So, I was listening to a lot of Charlie Xyx. I saw her perform at the Greek this year with my friend P Staff, and it was one of the most fun days of my entire year. Those are my top five though.

[00:41:31] Cass: So Nikita, we have gone on this incredible tour of your origins and your development as an artist and, dug into your recent show at 52 Walker. But I'm curious what is coming next for you?

[00:41:46] Nikita: So I got a couple of things. I have a solo exhibition with my gallery in Detroit Reyes Finn that is mid to late May of 2023. Solo exhibition at Emalin Gallery in London, I'm very excited about that'll be in the fall. Couple of group shows, group show I'm very excited about at I C A Philadelphia in the fall. I am also really excited to be working on an another issue of Triple Canopy. Also, my 52 Walker catalog comes out in the spring, which is very exciting. 

[00:42:26] Cass: which is W ell, Nikita, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. I really appreciate it. It's always such a treat to get to know an artist whose work I have just such, a jaw dropping experience with, like I did with your installation. 

[00:42:42] Nikita: Oh my gosh, thank you so much. 

[00:42:42] Cass: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation with Nikita Gale, as always, if you liked what you're hearing on the show, listener support is hugely important to making it all happen. You can always join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence where this week I am posting a super exclusive clip of Nikita and I totally nerding out over Tomb Raider 2 and other late nineties video games from our youth. So head on over to patreon.com/artobsolescence to get that exclusive. Or if you are interested in making a one time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts you can do so over at artandobsolescence.com/donate. And there, you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes. And last but not least, you can always find us on social media @artobsolescence until next time take care of my friends. My name is Cass Fino-Radin. And this has been Art and Obsolescence.