In the Air Tonight

My video In the Air Tonight and this exhibition at Canary mark the split between my ten-year history in the art world and a future in fiction filmmaking. Because to be honest, I don’t really want to be a full-time “contemporary artist” anymore. The dream has continued to reveal itself as a delusion, as if I’m the unpaid intern of Andrew Norman Wilson and he’s been gaslighting me for a decade. But how did I pull it off for so long? For the basics, I’m on medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment. I see the return policies offered by Bezos and The Waltons as loan agreements; I lend them $1500, and the interest they pay is my use of a new editing hard drive. While Turbotaxing I hallucinate a DJ software skin, transforming the expense estimate sliders into Fraud Modulator functions. Sometimes I sublet, but often I cat sit, dog sit, and plant sit—as I set up this show I’m also caring for three sulcata tortoises, an iguana, two doves, and several koi pond inhabitants in Laurel Canyon. I accept unpaid exhibition offers from salaried curators and gallerists in far flung cities and tack on lecture stops at €150 a pop, spending as much time as possible as a guest in circulation, on sofas, so as to avoid paying rent anywhere.