27 minute read
When Life Gives You Limbos
from FORM Vol. XXVI
Cassi Namoda is an artist based between New York and Los Angeles. Informed by her international upbringing and meticulous research, Namoda’s figurative paintings speak to universal themes, from myth and memory to climate change and colonialism. Her work is held in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has had solo exhibitions in galleries around the world, and both she and her work have appeared on covers of Vogue. FORM spoke to Namoda about colors, characters, and cooking.
Advertisement
Dani Yan: How’s LA? I know you split time between there and East Hampton — does the location impact how you work or the work that you make?
Cassi Namoda: Yes, and for the act of painting, the environment is really important. Everything is informative to the process. So just looking at the way the sunlight hits the leaves or the variations of green within the landscape, I think about all of that when thinking about landscape and the act of painting.
But then, at the same time, I’m in LA right now because I have an exhibition slated to open here around December. I’m expanding outward and I’m working with different materials and fabricators, and it’s so much more about the narrative for me, and it’s whatever story I feel like is honest to the exhibition that I’m making, or the painting that I’m making, or the body of work. As I’ve gone along, I’ve become much more honest to whatever narrative I feel. Once the narrative is concrete and I’m figuring out pigments, then I’m looking at the world around me. There’s this sort of inward moment and the ruminations begin. Then there’s other pontifications that start to happen once that’s figured out and then I’m really looking outward. It’s almost like I’m looking at the world with bigger eyes and maybe those moments when I’m more sensitive, there are specific palettes that might find themselves into my work.
DY: You’ve talked about taking early morning walks ahead of your “Little is Enough For Those in Love'' at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London and how the beautiful, soft colors you saw translated to your work. The most striking difference from your most recent works, like those in the show at Mendes Wood, from those in “Little is Enough For Those in Love',' is the color. You’ve talked about color bringing energy and vibration, and you’ve even been called a “color sage.” What was your thinking behind introducing these new mystic, saturated colors to your work?
CN: Every body of work informs the next, whether I realize it or not. When I did the Goodman show, “To Live Long Is to See Much,” it was almost like I was thinking about being stuck in this lucid world, and so that palette informed that dream life. And then when I started with the Mendes Wood show, I had made several paintings before that, which were these sort of religious paintings that were very much centered around landscape—these sort of barren, surreal landscapes. I was thinking about Flemish primitive painters and I was wanting to create this world with natural resources being depleted. I was specifically thinking about more developing communities in diaspora and in Asia and South America and how these people are the most vulnerable. And then it took a personal turn while I was thinking abou more personal narratives, like when my friends in Mozambique would tell me they wouldn’t be able to get sugars, or proteins, or basic fundamental ingredients during the civil war. They only had mackerel and rice. This kind of mackerel is a river fish, and I started painting these river fish throughout several bodies of work in these violet, black paintings. And then that gave birth to the Mendes Wood show, because I felt like I was sequestered into this dream world, into this landscape. This landscape is vulnerable, there’s solitude, there's quietness. And then I thought about adding this religious sentiment to it. I decided to have the whale as the central figure that would carry the story in this allegorical setting. And so, to work with a really tight palette would give more space to feel and explore.
A lot of what I’m doing, I know I’m reacting to it and then there is this expectation that others would react in the same way—whether or not that’s always successful, I’m not entirely sure, but that’s my aim. For instance, magenta is the highest color of calming, so I felt like magenta would be an important color to exist in an exhibition in Brazil, which has had a very tough time with both Bolsonaro and COVID. I wasn’t going to make a body of work that doesn’t coexist with reality. I’m thinking about the way that art can interact with reality, and not necessarily be escapism but relief.
DY: I like that you talked about the dreamscape drawing from different communities around the world, because I feel like many of the subjects and themes of your work, as well as your own background, are global. At the same time, much of your paintings are rooted in your birthplace, Mozambique. How do you capture a sense of place in your work?
CN: I grew up moving around every couple of years and living and observing in many different countries. I think all of that is informative of my DNA. I used Mozambique almost as a vessel. But I strive to create some sort of universalism between narrative and painting. I’m not telling a single story.
I feel passionate about having Mozambican heritage and also having gone and lived there in my early 20s,
which I feel like is an exploratory phase. So I was able to really dig deep within the landscape of literature and culture, and then find ways to dovetail it. It’s almost a process of quilting or threading. But my lens is not so linear, it’s really an expanded lens, so I feel like my most authentic approach is to create something universal.
DY: I get a sense of that universalism when looking at the people in your paintings, who are rendered in simple detail and usually not clearly belonging to a certain country or culture. In some paintings, like Little is Enough For Those with Love, they don’t have any facial features at all. Sometimes, I feel like I am exposed to the interior lives of your characters, from the recurring cast like Maria and the conjoined twins to those who only appear once like the sad man with flowers. Other times, I feel like there’s some distance between myself and the figures in your works. What do you want to convey about the characters in your works?
CN: It's all very relational. I think about the relation between the viewer and the painting. Sometimes, for instance with the Mendes Wood show, the figures are not very central. You’re always catching them as if you’re in another dimension. But then sometimes there’s intimacy, as if you’re there but you’re not invited. Like in the Pippy Houldsworth show, I was thinking about these native tribal postcards that the Portuguese would make that would always have racist colonial undertones. And then I thought about portraiture of native peoples in travel books. There’s always a bit of a disconnect between the gaze of the figure and the gaze of the viewer—almost like you’re not welcome or you’re not invited. I think it’s a protection. In the Pippy Houldsworth show, that’s what I was trying to convey, because it offered more intimate views into the characters. And then I did the Goodman show, where the characters were from a dream world. It was almost as if you closed your eyes and imagined them in a dream.
I think about how I want the characters to engage: in what perspective, in what composition, if there’s a closeness, if there’s a distance. These are all things I ruminate when I approach the canvas and it really varies from body of work to body of work.
DY: I’ve really loved hearing how you approach each body of work differently. You’ve said that you need to live, eat, and breathe your work in order to make it. Could you tell me about what you’re living, eating, and breathing now, and what kind of work that’s producing?
It’s funny, because I feel like I've been in a little bit of a limbo. Not in limbo with my work, but just in general. I think sometimes, life gives you limbos and you just have to embrace it. I think that’s a beautiful place to be in. And then I find the grounding elements in knowing that my practice is there. I don’t have an ego with being in the studio—there’s this ill notion that to be a really good artist, you must be overly productive. I think sometimes that could be to one’s detriment. Time in the studio is good, but time in the world engaging is just as important.
With the pandemic, all I want to do is go back to Africa, to Mozambique and to Kenya, just to observe and watch intimately. I’m very connected with people and those whom I do not know. Sometimes I want to just sit in a cafe on the side of a road somewhere to just watch and be engaged. All of that feeds my work. So I guess when I say I’m living, eating, and breathing, I’m saying that I stay in this moment where I’m thinking of what could make a painting more meaningful and better than the last.
And do my actions actually serve me in a holistic sense? For instance, I love cooking in my studio. When I’m not completely grounded, I’ll just be nervously snacking and I’ll realize I need to step back for a second and I’ll go make a salad or whatever. I think that moving with the meditative state actually works for me. And don’t get me wrong, I get these moments like Sun Ra when things become frazzled and everything becomes this culmination of process and energy, and I embrace that too. But I think it’s important to have both worlds, and I think a level of selfishness is really important.
DY: As an artist, like you said, everything is so holistic. Everything you’re doing, every person you’re interacting with, every dish or snack you’re eating, all of that contributes to the work in some way or another, even if that’s not translated on the canvas.
CN: Exactly. I have tons of research papers and images I’ve printed, books I’ve bought. I don’t necessarily have to execute those within a painting. They could just serve me spiritually. But then that is serving my energy for the painting. And that’s the thing—I really cut the fat. I’m not interested in making an overly done painting or an overly done narrative. I like to keep them really digestible. That’s my intention: that you can walk into a space and leave with a clear sentiment.
IMAGES courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery WRITING Dani Yan
Style
Ordered Pairs
I’ve always had an overwhelming distaste for being barefoot, particularly on hardwood floors. The untouched arch of my foot hovering over the bare wood torments me, and I need something to press onto the top of the joints of my toes. Leaving the carpeted stairs of my childhood home to feel that the soles of my feet, accidentally bare, had been left exposed to cold air and wooden planks, I was met with almost inexplicable discomfort. My sensory woes came to make way for an obsession, sensical because of how many pairs I required: fun socks.
My grandma Emma (which is not her name, but rather my sister’s toddler attempt at pronouncing grandma) provided an antidote when she picked out my first pair of eccentric socks: an off-white duo with a red ring at the top and red and blue stripes going up the foot. At the time, all of my socks sat neatly below my ankles outlining the rounded edge of my sneakers. These crept up my leg more boldly than I was used to, but Emma’s artistic eye overrode my hesitations. A month later I began accumulating socks of the same type in varying patterns. Finding the pairs that felt and looked right became crucial, as the ones that looked wrong bordered on physically irritating. I felt it, poking at me under my shoes.
Emma bought herself a pair of sparkly above-the-ankle ones when we were looking through fun pairs one day. Despite the fact that my grandma looks 15 years younger than she is, I had to draw the line at this pair. The glitter embedded in the black elastic was too suitable for Instagram influencers and the teenagers who follow them to sit underneath my grandma’s loafers and ballet flats. So, she gifted these socks to me. They became the socks I checked on after every load of laundry and bundled into my drawer immediately. They never sat there for more than a day. As I stretched the curled cuffs over my heel and pulled the speckled, hardened elastic onto my feet, Emma’s face flashed in my mind. Time passed and they shriveled and shrank so that putting on the pair came to feel like bundling my foot in Saran wrap. I pulled them on almost guiltily, dreading the sweat and stiffness that would ensue, knowing I’d feel immediate remorse. Still, I continued to give preference to the shine of the fabric over the sensation that came with it. The exercise in discomfort with the other pair had been a necessary test, pushing back at my obsession with tactile consistency. Eventually I found a pair of sparkly crew socks that were both shiny and soft. They stretched easily around my feet, the ribbed sides hugging the sheen closely to my skin. An apt blend of print and perception was sewn into that pack of sparkly crew socks; their glittery detail is woven into the elastic. That same elastic makes them so comfortable, unnoticeable where the old pair pulled and restrained. Those socks still sit at the top of my drawer, worn and washed and worn and washed.
They are one of many pairs that weaves sensation in with style in a synesthetic harmony that defines my choices of attire. A messily tie-dyed pair is just too long and has to be pushed down, so it feels as off as its colors look. The pair takes up space in my drawer now, a souvenir of my tie-dying attempts. It looks like a summer of craft projects, most having gone awry, but having created a messiness that is both pointed and calming. So I’ve kept the socks because they remind me of that day, and of having time to make things, useful or not. But also in part I just like that they feel how they look.
When I was younger I’d sleep over at Emma’s on special occasions. We’d go into NYC together and I’d get to dress up for the occasion. The last time we went, I spent a little extra time getting ready, making sure some part of my outfit was acquired from Emma. As I sit in front of my drawer and organize, I remember the element I chose. The socks poke out of the top of my bin as they're the size of three of my typical ankle-height pairs combined. This misshapen, oversized bundle draws my eyes back again and again to its unwillingness to sit in place. They used to be a bottom-layer pair and presented no particular harm. Purchased for some sort of summer camp event and only once put to use, the seam of off-white wool sits just below my knee. About an inch below that sit two parallel rings, sparks of heathered blue in the softer neutral strands. When presented with the task of staying warm on that trip into the city last winter, I dug these up in my dressing process. They kept the heat in under my widest-leg jeans. I’d often push aside that pair of
70
pants to avoid the rushes of cold air that slip in. Wearing the socks became about more than the temperature though. Having the wool sit tightly against my skin felt solid and even. The socks fully enclosed my leg, touching every surface evenly, buffering external stimuli.
As I walked around the city, my eyes were drawn away from the skyscrapers and billboards and swarms of tourists. Instead, I stepped evenly on the cracks in the sidewalk. That doesn’t mean a one-to-one ratio of left foot to right foot; there’s more nuance. A particularly large or uneven crack stepped on by one foot might mean two neat seams for the other. Stepping over a line with one foot might be half of stepping on one with the other. I tried to bring my left foot over the divot on 40th street to make up for the crack my right had hit on 41st. I stumbled as I did so. It’s impossible to calculate this evenness unless you feel the weight of the sized notches in your feet. My grandma dragged me along, begging me to mess up and I did. I stepped at a pace that couldn’t possibly match up with the panel sizes. As I then moved quickly over panels and tried to keep track of these qualitative rather than quantitative calculations, the swooshing of my pant legs did not faze me. The socks held me.
Since that trip, the pair has become a regular, providing a layer between steel chair legs and bare skin. Pants ride up when seated, and I’m convinced no one sits at a desk with their feet flat on the ground. I usually touch my left leg to the left desk leg when my right feels the cold metal nearest to it. Sometimes the temperatures and timing still feel unbalanced. The cotton sits in between the temperature gradient that the metal rungs create against my skin. Maybe I’ll still tap my left leg in response to my right now, but it’s more out of habit than compulsion. As the socks protect my legs, my hands, left untouched, become focal. Writing furiously, they heat up and it becomes imperative that my pinky and ring fingers jab into the center of my palm. They fill the gap the socks did under my arch or up to my knee. My long nails nearly break the skin but they cool down the heat I’ve created there. When I type, the sides of my thumbs take that place, touching in to keep my palms grounded. I sometimes wonder how much time I’d save taking a test if my hand could hold a pencil normally. Maybe it’s similar to the time I take to sift through my socks in the morning, considering my outfit and anticipating my shoe choice. Both are longer than I care to make public information. This pair is always a quick choice, jumping out of the precious pile. The way that the tightness of the calf sits under the looseness of the pants looks exactly how it feels. Secure but free, together yet relaxed.
WRITING Ali Rothberg
FUTURE VINTAGE
Kartik Kumra is a designer based in New Delhi. He founded his clothing label, Karu Research, while home from the University of Pennsylvania during the pandemic. All of Kumra’s pieces are created in partnership with Indian artisans, with every garment being produced locally. In the short time since its launch, Karu Research has taken off—the recent Spring/ Summer 2022 collection will be carried by Mr. Porter, Selfridges, SSENSE, and more elite stockists around the world. FORM spoke to Kumra about his process of working with artisans, the counter-cultural inspirations behind his recent collection, and his plans to open up physical stores in the future.
Dani Yan: I want to ask you more about the two cultural movements that inspired your Spring/Summer 2022 collection: post-independence Indian intellectualism and the counter-cultural movement of Beat Music. Where do these inspirations show up in the clothes?
Kartik Kumra: I’d like to talk you through what those movements are for you to get a better idea. India only got independence in 1946, so for the first however many years, it was really figuring out what the independent cultural identity was. And by the time people had enough money to enjoy themselves and do some stuff that they actually like, it was around the 70s. And in that era, you had the Beatles come on a trip, you had the Velvet Underground make an influence, and then a lot of British colonial record labels had left their offices in India. The Beat Music scene was basically the psychedelic, punk-ish sound. It's not very good, honestly. The music's very unrefined, like the start of something. But it was cool there. At least there was something. Because before that, there was nothing that was countercultural at all.
So there was this university that organized a concert in the hills, and that concert led to a compilation album, which our sound artist found online. And then I went and got an original copy of that album at this place in Old Delhi. And it was weird, because stylistically, it was people making use of what they had. So they would have loose menswear tailoring, but then they would style it in a punk way by maybe putting on a crochet hat or including some sort of color to accessorize. So I wanted to bring those things together.
DY: What aspects of Indian culture are you looking to explore in future collections?
KK: So this one was a little bit of a smaller collection, it’s only 25-ish pieces. I didn’t feel like I could make an extensive collection, because the brand was so new. The second collection is a more in-depth exploration of a particular theme. So one of the things that we're doing as a policy for the company is that every piece is going to have some artisanal input, irrespective of how big the brand gets. So even if we’re doing a t-shirt, we’ll figure out a way to do some embroidery on them. And what I wanted to really explore was the idea of ornamentation in these artisanal communities that we were working with. So for the collection, there’s this community of banana fiber weavers and they make a textile that moves. It’s not stiff. It’s made from the husk of the banana fiber, and the community that makes it actually uses it as the basis for all their jewelry and all sorts of luxury goods. So maybe it’s a function of a lack of access to resources or gold or silver, but the aspirational thing is this thing that the community is producing. So I wanted to see why certain artisanal communities look at their craft as their aspirational good. Like some block printers will want to just collect more block printing fabrics from their archives and other people's archives. Their end game is they get the money that they make to get these collections. In urban India and the rest of the world, the aspiration for money and how you use your money is very different to how it is in these artisanal communities. And you can share those production processes and put them on the stage at Selfridges or Mr. Porter next to Dries van Noten or Prada. It’s a very different way of looking at how you can value clothes.
DY: What is your process of working with artisans? How hands-on are you?
KK: It's completely direct. I have all their phone numbers. At the start, when I was conceptualizing what the brand could be, I started by just traveling. As soon as we got out of lockdown in India, whenever cases were slightly low, I would just go drive to a community and see what the possibilities were. I’m not trained in fashion, so a lot of the design process originates from the textile. So the process is we just go out exploring. I have no real language barrier most of the time, so I can communicate with them pretty directly. Sometimes it’s through an NGO, but I would say 80% of the time, it’s directly one-on-one with the artisan.
A lot of times I’ll ask them to show me the archive. They’ll keep a swatch of everything they've made in the past, and this goes back 30, 40 years or however long they’ve been going or the family has been going. So you can find some really cool stuff if you build a mutual level of trust—most of that is speaking the language, being respectful. A lot of the time, it’s not really about the money. So you want to be like, “Okay, this is your art, I understand it takes time, I understand it’s hard to reproduce for a business. Now how do we start?” So not going in with these business-oriented goals, which was a learning curve for me as well, because you want the same thing that you saw the first time. For the
first collection, between the sample and the final product, we had to do a little bit back and forth with the retailer, because we couldn’t achieve the exact same thing, because it’s all done by hand. A natural dye will absorb differently. So that’s reliant on a very in-depth conversation with the artisan. Every morning is pretty much doing my rounds to call each person that we work with. I think we have a rolodex of around 50 to 60 people across the first four seasons. No one guy’s really producing more than two fabrics. So that’s a large logistics management on my part.
DY: How do you pick which artisan you want to work on each piece?
KK: So they're usually very skilled at one particular thing, and it takes a long time for them to produce it. Within a NGO, I can say they probably have 15 to 20 looms, 20 artisans, so they can produce three fabrics for me in a season and it'll take them two months to produce 100 meters. It’s a very time consuming process to make the fabric. And if I get it wrong initially and we have to restart, we have to account for all of that. But if it’s just a single guy running it out of his home with a single loom, you can really only rely on him for one fabric per season. One loom for one season, I don’t think you can produce more than what would be the equivalent of eight t-shirts. So there is a constraint, that’s a challenge for scale. I have to think about that as we grow. But for now, it’s very much like one guy produces one thing and he specializes in one particular technique.
DY: I’m very impressed by how quickly your brand has grown. You went from selling on Instagram to the biggest stockists in the world just within the pandemic. How did you make that happen?
KK: Yeah, so that's not by myself. I have an agent who is really good. The first season was 25 pieces and he just said “let’s see what happens.” I wasn’t expecting anything, I had 800 followers at the time. Even right now it’s 3000 something followers. But a lot of them are fashion enthusiasts and consumers. It’s not really my friends, they don’t even know about it. So it was more people who listen to fashion podcasts and are actively reading stuff, so that part helped. What happened was the red shorts from this season, my agent posted them on the first day that he got the collection at a show in London. And within that
day, the whole buying teams for all these retailers started following. That was not expected at all. 800 followers, you’re not expecting anything, because I’m not really bringing much of an audience to the table. The stores really have to push it at this point. It was really surprising, especially since there aren’t any Indian brands. There’s one on SSENSE also starting this season. It was pretty unexpected.
DY: I didn’t know there were so few Indian brands in this market. I feel like some bigger brands incorporate an Indian aesthetic, or even work with Indian artisans, but they’re maybe still more like outsiders going into those communities.
KK: Some of those brands do a good job, they’re cool. But there are other brands where sometimes I just wonder: where’s the connection? Because there’s no relation to India outside of the production and the aesthetics. So sometimes I wonder where the authenticity is coming from. But at the same time it’s giving work to people who need work.
DY: You definitely do things the right way with your brand, and I love that you said you will continue to have that artisanal touch on every piece even as Karu continues to grow. Where do you see your brand going from here?
KK: What I want to do is open up physical stores. Everything’s a very vibey minimalist store, but I want it to be a completely different sensory experience for the consumer. And the stores will only have pieces that are one-of-one or small batch, like under ten, so that it doesn’t interfere with stockist stuff or the collection that sells at wholesale. But there are these retail experiences at some places around the world where you enter the store, you enter a world that you’ve never seen before at a different store. It’ll have antique Indian furniture and be a little chaotic, and very cluttered as opposed to very sleek and minimalist. What I imagine is very different from other stores. My stores will only have antiques or artisanal stuff. So that way you can always make sure customers stay enthusiastic about your product. And if you keep making one-of-one products, they’ll always be enthusiastic. Look at Our Legacy Workshop—Our Legacy is huge now, but at the workshop, you’ll always find cool stuff that you haven’t seen before. So I want to keep that essence there while we scale.
PHOTOGRAPHY courtesy of Karu Research WRITING Dani Yan
