Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Serulneck.
Hi Justin, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I moved to Los Angeles from New York in the 2000s to be a filmmaker. While in Los Angeles, I was exposed to interesting work that was happening in art, film, and video. I made experimental films and took images for many years until I decided that exhibiting in a contemporary art context better fit the kind of work I was interested in making.
I attended CalArts and studied both art and film, and received an MFA from both the photography and film programs. While I was there, I was able to meet with and learn from amazing faculty who included Scott Benzel, Charles Gaines, Sharon Lockhart, Ashley Hunt, Michael Ned Holte, Jeannene Przyblyski, Cauleen Smith, my mentor in the photo program Andrew Freeman, and my mentor in the film program James Benning, amongst others. CalArts is a great place to open up, go really wide and figure out where you want your practice to head. I also spent a lot of time in dialogue working with Adam Feldmeth at the Southland Institute. All these artists and thinkers informed my approach to making art. I think the best thing about CalArts were the group critiques which were very open and engaging, you learn how to read work and learn how others will read your work. The phenomena that my practice addresses are very complex, often exceeding the boundaries of what can be represented visually, so I always make sure the art is very readable, and I learned how to do that in critique.
I’m passionate about arts education and helping artists find their way. I teach photography courses at UCLA Extension and I like to help students develop their practice.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Los Angeles is a city that’s constantly shifting, a site of oppositional forces, and a territory where the debris of the past is perpetually buried under the weight of the new. There are no smooth roads in Los Angeles, especially for artists.
My hardest struggles were finding myself as an artist, figuring a “right” direction for myself while understanding the geography in which I lived. It’s one thing for an artist to imagine possibilities outside our lived experience, it’s another thing to delve in and attempt to delineate the parameters of our present, and I take this latter path. Work is always a struggle, albeit a productive one.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
In my practice, I attempt to make sensible the chaos and instability that the present historical moment offers. I examine events and phenomena that are normally considered in isolation, and through locating relations, catastrophes of the present emerge as consequences of structural and political forces in action.
In my 2019 installation Ash, I was trying to make sense of spiking rents and the insufficiently examined issue of gentrification. I was asking myself, how can I approach this thing that everyone knows is happening but seems unable to substantiate or model on a large scale. My research started getting me into data on homeless populations, rents, and real estate development. Simultaneously, there were a number of wildfires that were going on. First, there had been the La Tuna Canyon Fire between the 5 and 210 freeways. Then, there was the Thomas Fire in Ojai. I would go out and film the wildfires and the landscapes that were changed after the fires finished burning. In my research, I discovered this micro-economy of prison labor being used to fight the fires while rent prices would potentially spike where fires had taken place, especially with the Woolsey Fire in Malibu. It still baffles me what exactly is this structure where it makes more financial sense to build a house where it’s likely to burn than develop more effectively outside of the vicinity of fires. Who bears the cost of that structure, homeowners or the general public? Who profits? So I made a few evidentiary artworks posing these questions, and then I made a landscape video examining the aftermath of the Thomas Fire, giving us the opportunity to have that sense of touch of material, texture, light, and surface, aesthetic elements that we can associate with the Anthropocene.
Simultaneously, I was looking at the formation of private real estate development that was taking place in Los Angeles. Data provided to me by researchers demonstrated a spike in investment by private equity firms to purchase existing housing in lower-income communities, such as Inglewood, Lancaster, and Palmdale, and then rent those houses out, increasing rents by as much as 10% yearly. So, the data guided me where to document the market-rate aesthetics of the crisis. Over a decade ago, if you were cash-strapped, you could find a cheap place to survive, either on the periphery or in downtown. Now that’s no longer the case, everyone who is not on the side of property ownership is at risk.
I started asking questions, if rents are really going up and people are indeed affected, there must be some sort of recorded material from that process. An ongoing countywide annual homeless count established the actual increase of people landing on the street. I asked myself, how can I obtain a literal representation of the loss I’m thinking about, and how would this be recorded by an official authority, by the state? I made a public records request to the LA County Medical-Examiner Coroner, from which I was able to obtain a decade of records of unhoused death. What the numbers showed was an enormous increase, an approximate doubling, of annual deaths from 2013-2018 to over 900 per year in 2018. And as we now know, unhoused death went up even more significantly since, doubling again to present numbers of just under 2,000 in the post-pandemic year.
I represented the data in diagrammatic prints and I then made a video on the annual burial of the unclaimed dead. Every year the County has a ceremony for the unclaimed, cremated remains of those who died three years prior who are finally buried that year. So when we think about what happens to the unhoused, they likely have no one to claim their body or remains after they die, which is tragic… Now, while the County’s interfaith ceremony for the burial is well publicized, that ceremony occludes the actual burial, in which a backhoe dumps the unseparated remains of the unclaimed together in a single plot dedicated to a given year. It’s a mass grave. Anyone who finds themselves alone in life without resources ends up there. What my video tries to do is to shift our attention toward those who died and away from the theatricality of the County’s ceremony.
During this period of Covid, I think activists have done an amazing job in bringing attention to the complicity of elected leaders, especially those on LA City Council, and it’s become more clear that the prior status quo and implementation of policies such as 41.18 are not only unpopular with Angelenos but are also metrics for being campaigned out of office. I’m enthusiastic about recent progressives who’ve been elected.
My most recent work attempts to make sense of the debacle of the 2020 election and addresses conspiracy, extremist beliefs and the political instability we may again soon face. On the center and the left, we were all worried about the state of our country during Trump, and we continue to have strong reasons to take concern with extremist ideologies facilitated by social media. Even after the national reckoning of January 6, extremist events still occur which cost people their lives.
So I was thinking about Twitter and how Twitter and other social media platforms have been leveraged to pray on and manipulate peoples’ beliefs. I had been doing data captures of Twitter’s network tagging then-President Trump’s personal use account to model the field of social media on specific historical days – Trump’s birthday which is Flag Day, for instance. And leading up to the 2020 Election Day, I was wondering what that social media space would look like on Twitter and how that digital architecture, sitting between a public commons and propaganda machinery, relates to our concepts of free speech and democracy. How do we measure, for instance, the disproportionate inequality of a single voice? Whose voice matters?
So, on Election day, I took a 5-minute data capture of Twitter’s entire network associated with the two presidential candidates and organized collected media and tweets to construct a representation of Twitter on that day: a scroll of 2,607 video and photographic media which appeared in over 11,000 tweets during the 5 minutes. That deluge of media scrolls in front of a video of the Statue of Liberty constructed from 27 hours of internet-sourced livestream-footage, also taken on Election Day. What’s important to take into account is that regardless of how many accounts Twitter had already suspended and banned, so many of the active posters on Twitter were bots at the time of the election and were retweeting and reposting conspiracy-oriented media as well as Republican narratives warning of potential voter fraud, a narrative which would build toward the January 6 insurrection. In the artwork, you see all this toxic media that represents the space of Twitter on Election Day, passing in front of the Statue of Liberty for over three hours, almost like a stock ticker. That scroll of media makes tactile the ideological sphere surrounding the election which our country still faces. And now, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter provides us with a new set of instabilities.
I exhibited the video In the Name of the Public at The Horse, a wonderful contemporary art space in Dublin, Ireland. I was happy that the audience could read across the individual artworks that I was connecting the issue of free speech with my Twitter artwork to ideas from John Stuart Mill’s thinking on liberty in the 1850s and then in relation to the disastrous effects of concretized ideologies put into action within our contemporary moment.
So, I ask with this recent exhibition, in this era of technological media acceleration, how are liberty and its partner, democracy, holding up?
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
I make artwork that I believe will be challenging and relevant to the outside world. That’s what I care about. Simultaneously, I’m always trying to push beyond where I’ve been. The newest work is always trying to break with forms I’ve developed or utilized in the past. In that way, the practice destabilizes itself in a way that I hope is generative.
Contact Info:
- Website: justinserulneck.com
- Instagram: where_is_justin
Image Credits
Portrait of Justin Serulneck, Juan Herrera, ig juanherreraart.
Exhibition documentation, courtesy of the artist:
#1 Ash (exhibited in Economies at ltd los angeles): Burial Plot, UHD video, 15 minutes 6 seconds Thomas Fire Landscapes, UHD video, 9 minutes 30 seconds Untitled, 2019, concrete and ash collected from the Thomas Fire, 66 x 36 x 36 inches.
#2 Brush Fire, UHD video, 18 minutes 6 seconds (part of the installation Everyday Risks).
#3 Flag 2022, corroded copper, rusted steel 5.7 x 3 feet (exhibited in Libertine Logics at The Horse).
#4 Four Nights to Help Us Think, 4 channels synchronized, UHD video, 30 minutes 15 seconds (part of the installation Everyday Risks).
#5 In the Name of the Public, 3 hours 16 minutes, UHD video, 59.94 fps (exhibited in Libertine Logics at The Horse).
#6 Regência to Bento Rodrigues, 6 channels, 1 hour 53 minutes.
#7 The Report, the Material, and the Image, mixed media installation: concrete collected from the site of the St. Francis Dam collapse, front page of The New London Day (March 14, 1928), excerpts from the Coroner’s Inquest investigating the St. Francis Dam collapse (exhibited in Haunts at JOAN).
#8 WE NEED A SYMBOL, video still and quotation from Ghostbusters II (1989), video still in negative from anti-mask rally in front of Los Angeles City Hall in May 2020, transparency print on acrylic over digital print on wood, copper-plated standoffs 22 x 28 x 2 1/2 inches (exhibited in Libertine Logics at The Horse).