Casey Kauffmann

Photo by Ryan Miller

Casey Kauffmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, installation, video, and a variety of digital mediums. She is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego. Kauffmann was born in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California in 1989. She lives and works in Southern California and received her MFA from The University of Southern California in 2020 and her Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her work has been featured in publications such as Artnet, Artillery, LAWeekly, The New Yorker, I-D Vice, and Hyperallergic. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in galleries such as Transfer Gallery, Centro de Cultura Digital, Human Resources, Lyles and King, Coaxial, Arebyte, Cirrus, and more. Kauffmann’s collage Instagram project @uncannysfvalley, which she started in 2014, features digital collage works and GIFs created using only her iPhone. The pieces Kauffmann posts to this account are an ever-accumulating collection of material from all corners of the internet, sourced from Tumblr, Instagram, and Google. This Instagram account and body of work has been exhibited in many galleries, written about in several esteemed publications, and led to her admission to the MFA program at the University of Southern California. Kauffmann’s drawing practice functions as an inquiry into the representation of femme emotion and hysteria in both art history and popular culture.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?

CK: I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and am one of four sisters, so [I was] around a lot of femme energy. My mom is a pageant queen from the Valley; she was Queen of Queens in the Hollywood Parade. She’s lovely, hilarious, and a very charming woman, but she also suffers from mental illness and has a strong personality. (Laughs) My father made Barbie commercials my whole life; he worked at Mattel. Also being [raised] in Los Angeles, you grow up with really oppressive and strong relationships to beauty standards. My dad was also this liberal, strong-minded hippie who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was a part of the Student’s for Democratic Society. He taught me to question these things, but also exposed me to it. The femme side of my family somewhat embraced these beauty standards, and I kind of felt outside of that.

GM: Did you feel stuck in the middle?

CK: Yeah, totally! A great place for inspiration is being in the middle. (Laughs) I never did well at school – I barely graduated from high school. But I was always interested in art and took art lessons as a kid. I ended up at Evergreen State College in Washington state, which is a wonderful place. [There are] no grades or tests, just feelings. It’s outside of the normal, institutional standard, and I went there because I felt like I was this hippie. And then I got there and realized, “I’m not a hippie, I’m an LA bitch!” (Laughs) Again, it’s these opposing forces that make you realize your perspective, and I was taking a bunch of art classes. I ended up having this collection of digital material because I was on Tumblr and didn’t really know how to use it. Eventually, I got into the practice of collage. I didn’t have a computer when I graduated undergrad, didn’t know how to use Photoshop, and didn’t have any of those digital skills. But I wanted to talk about the way that I grew up with these mass cultural ephemera presentations. I’ ve been collecting images relating to that on Tumblr for years. I would print out these images and I would use objects to make physical collages in a scanner so that I could participate in digital art. I’d smoke a bunch of Fantasia cigarettes, put it in the scanner, and put extension tracks in with the scanned images. I really think that my path to becoming an artist came from a really colorful family life and the opposing forces of my perspective and the mass culture that I consumed my whole life.

GM: Your practice really highlights reality television, found images, and popular memes – The Real Housewives, Bad Girls Club, The Hills, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and Rock of Love are some of the few that have been represented. Pornography is also a very common theme – could you talk about this?

CK: I look at the figures that I use as actors for me. I get to talk about these deeper and more difficult issues by using someone else as the figure, and I speak through them. (Continued)

There’s two ways that that works. It’s somebody else’s face and their humor, and the use of social media that gives that distance where I’m able to talk about deeply personal issues. Humor is really rooted in anger and trauma for me. With reality television, I’m super interested in the concept of the hysterical woman and the way that representations of femme emotion show up in visual culture throughout history, art history, and contemporary culture. I can never not think about John Berger talking in “Ways of Seeing” , a BBC series from 1972, about how in [classical] paintings a woman is often has a mirror in her hand and is condemned for being vain, yet the man who painted her put the mirror in her hand. I’m interested in how femme identifying figures in television are often placed in a scenario where they are damned for their reactions, but the scenario itself creates that reaction. I’ ve been watching reality TV my whole life, and there’s always this question [I ask myself] when I perform emotion or selfhood – am I really being myself, or am I reenacting what I’ ve consumed? Casey Kauffmann, #comrade, 2021

[...] The Real Housewives of Orange County premiered in 2006. I graduated from high school in 2007, and that era is when social media came to its greatest prominence. MySpace launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Instagram in 2010. The apps that we are familiar with today came to prominence at the same time as reality television. This dissolve of public and private life that is demonstrated in both genres is so deeply connected to how we perform selfhood and emotion today, and how we interact with one another.

GM: Reality television absolutely exploded due to the 2007-08 Writer’s Strike. All network shows were on pause for months and either had to end early or air a shortened season. Because reality television doesn’t officially have writers, that genre boomed during this time.

CK: I’ ve seen every single episode of every city franchise of The Real Housewives. I am a voracious television consumer, and I also think that [one should] turn your negative addiction into your practice and base your research on what you love. […] To address the pornography side of [my work], I’m also really interested in how the mass culture representation of sexuality has mostly been authored by white men. There’s questions such as, “Is my fantasy my own, or is it what I’ ve consumed? Is my kink a part of the culture that I’ ve been exposed to, or what I really like?” There's this blurred line between who I am and what I've seen. For me, using pornographic images is just me taking the tools that were made by someone else and turning it into my own fantasy. It comes in many forms and a lot of it comes out [of it] in a critical way but all of it feels therapeutic.

GM: What is the story behind your photo collages? How do you create them?

CK: A huge part of the joy of my work is when memes are funny and built on inside jokes. There is a shared community built through the presentation of images that is only made possible through online image economies, and I live for that response. (Laughs) […] Artists often have to justify their work in hindsight; I started my Instagram in 2014 and began making these works, and I didn’t fully understand what I was doing. Through educating myself further, I’ ve come to understand the real motivations behind my work. [There is an] interest in the joy of shared culture and content. I read the piece “In Defense of the Poor Image” by the artist Hito Steyerl in graduate school, and it blew my mind. The degradation in image quality that occurs when images circulate online is due to their popularity and is a representation of shared culture and popularity. When I re-contextualize these images through the process of collage, I wonder, “Does [the image] hold on to the aura of its exchange?” Anybody could make [the work that I make] by downloading the free app that I have. I have a real interest in creating work that is about accessibility. The process of collage is also a function within all of my work, even my drawing practice, and I really like to think about how that magical moment of putting one image next to another creates new meaning. I’m really interested in the puzzle of generating new meanings through that process.

Casey Kauffmann, #attentionseeker, 2015

GM: Let’s get into some specific works of yours – could you start with #attentionseeker (2015)?

CK: #attentionseeker is an early piece that I made when I started @uncannysfvalley. I really wanted to build an artistic community in Los Angeles, but I have pretty bad social anxiety, even though I’m a big talker! (Laughs) My battery drains really quickly, so social media was a way for me to connect with people, and I wanted to share my work without embarrassment. I was into the idea of social media facilitating shameless validation seeking, which is the whole reason that the platform exists. We want to be known and connect with other people; I don’t think there’s any shame in wanting attention and validation. […] #attentionseeker is a collage where I was being really honest. I made a Facebook page for my Instagram, and I just wanted people to follow me. Without even knowing it, I made the connection between social media and reality television. I loved these women, the need for attention, and these performative gestures where you don’t know what’s real and you don’t know what’s fake.

Casey Kauffmann, Knowing Others and Wanting To Be Known, 2020 - Ongoing

GM: Let’s transition to two of your more recent pieces, Knowing Others and Wanting To Be Known (2020 - Ongoing) and Look At My Life (2022).

CK: I made Knowing Others when I was in grad school, which I went to because I felt my Instagram practice had reached this plateau. [It had become] these images repeating the same subject matter and connecting with the same kind of people. I wanted to know how I could take it further conceptually, technically, and formally. I did run into some faculty who looked at my work and didn’t understand it due to “ generational difference. ” Because I’m about accessibility, I want to create as wide of a field of understanding as possible. […] I had made gifs before, but I never made video work, which gave additional dimensions of time and voice to my work. Knowing Others and Wanting To Be Known addressed that; that piece functions like a social media timeline. It’s these short narratives strung together to create a binge-watching experience; I would love one day for it to be five hours long. All of these episodes [in the piece] are strung together, with the hope that I can keep adding these episodes that reflect the culture I’m consuming in the moment. […] Look at My Life features Erika Girardi, Jen Shah, Ramona Singer, and Eboni K. Williams from The Real Housewives. During the pandemic, there were social uprisings that forced reality television to address inequity in a way that they never had before. My personal belief is that if you are as rich as some of these women, you ’ ve oppressed people. You don’t get that rich in this country without fucking with other people. (Laughs)

GM: We both love reality TV, so let’s talk Housewives for a minute! It’s interesting how Erika and Tom Girardi always milked [his connection to the Erin Brockovich case], but he was not the main attorney that worked with Erin. The film shows that and everyone knows that. I had never heard of the Girardi’s until The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I knew who Garcelle Beauvais, Denise Richards, Brandi Glanville, Kathy Hilton, and Faye Resnick were, for various reasons, usually relating to acting careers or the tabloids.

CK: I think that all viewers of reality TV get really excited when there’s this undeniable connection of real life on the show, which we all know to some degree is fake. With Jen Shah and Erika Girardi, these are two women who are crying on television and getting very upset, but have seriously oppressed and hurt people, and done vile fucking things. I don’t doubt that Erika probably had less knowledge than her husband did, but she’s absolutely guilty. [Editor ’ s Note: Tom Girardi was accused of misappropriating client funds in December 2020 and is involved in numerous ongoing lawsuits due to his misconduct. He has since been disbarred.] She knew what the fuck was going on. And Jen Shah, my god – that’s with intent and knowing what she’s doing. [Editor ’ s Note: Jen Shah of RHOSLC pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in July 2022. She will be sentenced in January 2023.]

GM: I just love how Andy Cohen is completely done with [Jen Shah]. She’s not on the [RHOSLC] After Show or WWHL, and she wasn’t at this year’s BravoCon. I can’t blame him, what she did is horrible. Erika Girardi doesn’t realize that most people do not think that she conspired with Tom to steal his client’s money. What people think is that Tom stole the money to buy Erika that crap, and that’s why we want her to give it back! If a thief steals a car and gives it to you, you don’t get to keep the car!

CK: You couldn’t have said it better – it’s still a crime! And she definitely needs a new publicist. (Laughs) Her callous responses are fucking herself over.

Casey Kauffmann, Look At My Life, 2022

Installation view of Knowing Others and Wanting To Be Known (2020 - Ongoing) in the exhibition Who Do You Think You Are I Am (August 2020). Photo by Jackie Castillo

GM: They ’re bad, and when she’s saying “ alleged” victims – they were already victims! That’s the point. They were already determined to be victims of their individual circumstances, and that’s why there were settlements.

CK: She used to be one of my favorites to watch, and now I’ ve never hated a Housewife more than I hate her. But I still think she’s great to watch. […] There’s this clash between what’s happening in reality and the façade, [as in] the synthesized nature of these carefree women who [just care about money]. Then there’s a doubling down with The Real Housewives of New York and [the tension] between Ramona and Ebony.

GM: Oh my god. I’ ve never been so uncomfortable watching something aside from the Black Sabbath dinner. [Editor ’ s Note: This took place during RHONY Season 13, which aired in 2021.] I wanted to die. (Laughs)

CK: It’s insane. I was losing my mind watching that. It’s such an incredible [example] of what Black women go through. The poise and calm that Ebony displays in that moment is just so fucking unfair with this psychotic woman. It’s mind-blowing, but there’s the macro-oppression of the bigger crimes, where millions of dollars are being taken from underrepresented victimized people, and then there’s the micro-aggressions of the interaction between Ebony and Ramona, which happened because Bravo wasn’t doing a good job of representing people of color.

GM: I remember what happened with Vanderpump Rules, with Stassi [Schroeder] and Kristen [Doute], along with several other cast members, getting fired for ignorant and racist comments and actions. But they had been doing that for years – Stassi’s podcast episode where she and Kristen openly laughed about filing a false police report about a Black cast member, Faith Stowers, had been online for two years before Bravo did anything. Stassi had also made ignorant comments regarding the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. Bravo just didn’t care until they were forced to. I still read comments of people saying they want Stassi and Kristen back because the show is “boring” without them, but it’s a different experience for me as a Black viewer. (Continued)

There’s a lot of racism within the Bravo-sphere, and I know there’s people out there that refuse to watch Atlanta or Potomac because those shows have predominately Black casts. And I still see people blaming Leah [McSweeney] and Eboni for RHONY’ s cancellation. Leah was only there for two seasons and Ebony for one. They did not get a years-long franchise cancelled. We all know whose fault it really was, and I hate the misdirected blame.

CK: These things have always been an issue, and the only reason they ’re being addressed is from societal pressure and social justice movements. It’s a really interesting moment where these women are having to answer for their victimization of people. Bravo itself and the [Housewives] franchises have to answer for their lack of representation and inability to address the issues at hand. […] I also watched all of these Karen videos coming out; [there has been] increased accountability because people have cell phones in their hands. These women have always been there, but now it’s being exposed on these platforms. The whole point of that piece was to draw a comparison between what is happening in The Real Housewives franchise and what happens in everyday life that gets documented. My work often deals with this very particular hysteria that comes from white femme representation and privilege, so this piece was an opportunity for me to talk about that at a larger scale.

GM: This August, you had a joint exhibition with John de Leon Martin at Human Resources. Why did you two decide to collaborate together?

CK: I’d known John De Leon Martin for years on the Internet, and the curator of the show, John Bertle, and I have followed each other for a while. I went to a recent show of de Leon Martin’s and met him for the first time, and John Bertle was there. He watched us interact, thought about our work, and said we were a great match. What connects me and de Leon Martin is the collage making process. John considers himself a collage artist, even though he’s also a painter. We’re two signs of a very similar coin and both have this particular sense of humor. John is really interested in fantasy and video games, and I’m into hyper pop culture and femme culture. We’re also both interested in sexuality, his from a queer male perspective and mine from a cis-hetero one. […] I have a physical drawing practice, but I thought that having this video collage process alongside John’s painting collage process [would show] alternate versions of what collage can be. It’s not about cutting out a magazine and putting [the pieces] together. I thought that would be an interesting pairing, and [I also wanted] to see how I could physically integrate my work into his, which is why I had all these video collages on tablets and iPhones. I thought it was a great show and it was wonderful to see our work together! Tons of respect for both John’s.

Casey Kauffmann, Who Is She, 2020. Photo by Jackie Castillo

GM: Your Instagram handle is @uncannysfvalley, and I was wondering what you think of the “Uncanny Valley” theory by Masahiro Mori, which translates to bukimi no tami (the valley of eeriness) in Japanese.

CK: I saw Jordan Wolfson’s Femme Figure (2014) on Tumblr, alongside the definition of “Uncanny Valley. ” This idea of “Uncanny Valley ” is the discomfort of seeing an animatronic figure and its connection to human representation. I use that term is because I’m showing a digital reflection of my emotions and testing the level of discomfort that comes from that. Even in 2014, I understood that my work was really about things that were deeply personal, difficult, and challenging to me. I was digitally manifesting those emotions through other figures and seeing what kind of discomfort was generated. The “ sf” in between the phrase is because I’m from the San Fernando Valley and it’s a direct reference to that.

GM: Any thoughts on NFT’s and web3?

CK: I really think that my work would do well in the NFT universe, but I can’t really figure out how to break into it. Any technological development seems to come with this promise of democratization. […] The beginning of Internet art came with this post-human and post-body idea, but it’s not possible because all of these things are made with the ingredients of this oppressive life. You can’t have a post-body world when all the constricting parts of this world become a part of the Internet. I think that NFT’s and web3 come with the promise of democratization, but it’s still an elitist practice that is only accessible to the people who already have that knowledge, such as tech bros. I just feel like everyone I talk to that asks me about NFT’s don’t know what they are! (Laughs) It’s very smart people who say that they don’t fucking get this, and I understand what it means, but I also think that there’s so much of it that is inaccessible. It really serves the people who are already there. It’s not something that’s easy to break into, and I don’t see it being sustainable. I think that it unfortunately functions the same way that selling art does. (Continued)

I think that it unfortunately functions the same way that selling art does. It’s a system for money laundering. (Laughs) But would I like to sell NFT’s and make a bunch of money? For sure! There’s a side of it that is really positive because it’s really hard for digital artists to figure out how to make a living when they have a nonobject practice, so if anyone out there wants to help me with my NFT career, fucking do it! (Laughs)

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

CK: I’m working with Times Square Arts to create a piece for Midnight Moment that’s going to be shown in Times Square in February, which is really exciting. They have been so lovely to work with. I have been making a lot of work that is an expanded version of gif work. [The show at Human Resources] inspired a lot of small projects that function in the same way as silent videos that loop. I’m really hoping to get back into the integration of my drawing practice and my digital work, which is something I did in grad school. I end up getting stuck into this digital video art realm, but I really identify as an interdisciplinary artist. I have some video work that’s going to be screened in public spaces in France for The Showcase part of L’Unique, but after the quarter ends at UCSD, I’ll sleep for a minute and binge old episodes of Housewives. (Laughs)

Casey Kauffmann, #meanicelady, 2020 Casey Kauffmann, #zoomzoombinch, 2017

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in November 2022.