OPENING ACT

Left: Kohshin Finley, Woman in Scarf, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.; above: Kohshin Finley, A Portrait of the Artist as Himself, oil on canvas, 2022, 24 x 18 in.

Kohshin Finley brings LA sensibilities to Texas swagger at Various Small Fires’ new Dallas outpost.

INTERVIEW BY ESTHER KIM VARET

Returning to her hometown, Esther Kim Varet will open Various Small Fires’ (VSF) third outpost within The Joule hotel complex, timed to the Dallas Art Fair. Renowned for her galleries in LA and Seoul, here she visits with LA painter Kohshin Finley, a new addition to the VSF roster.

Esther Kim Veret (EKV): Kohshin, I am excited to have this interview with you for VSF’s new space opening in Dallas and your solo exhibition in July. I would love to know why Texas is an interesting place in your eyes, on a cultural and personal level, to exhibit your work. Kohshin Finley (KF): I’ve had plenty of friends in the past few years go to Austin and Dallas, uprooting their lives and moving on a whim. I’ve always seen or heard of places like that in Texas as these sanctuaries for new beginnings. So in thinking about having the solo show there— it’s kind of an interesting moment because I know it’s your home and it’s like a homecoming for you. For me it’s a start of a new chapter, and having this show at VSF Dallas and being a part of your story and the gallery’s story also extends my story. EKV: Your work is about personal relationships with friends and family, and you take your camera around with you to capture moments. Could you talk a little bit about family and what it’s meant to you? I would love for you to go into your black-and-white documentary style as well. KF: My parents were fashion designers as I was growing up; the front part of

our home was their design studio. I literally grew up on a cutting table, as my mom and dad were cutting fabric and designing, directing patternmakers and sewers. As a four-year-old, I was able to see a vision come to life, from a drawing to somebody wearing a full corset dress made of lambskin. My parents and my brothers have always been the most supportive people in my life, especially as a creative family, and it’s always been paramount to me to honor that and to reflect that in the work. I think that’s why people and community are so integral to the work that I do.

In thinking about why the work is in black and white and grisaille— it’s important to reflect the initial way that the imagery is captured in black-and-white film. Black-and-white photography distills the image in a really wonderful way; you get to focus on the details and really see the person and how they feel. They’re in focus and they’re paramount to the story. EKV: I was looking up the grisaille technique earlier today, and I came across a phrase saying that it was traditionally used to imitate sculpture, which I think is so great because it does bring in this element of a lived experience, or time and space, into these two-dimensional objects. KF: I would have to say it’s been a grounding force to my work since my friend Erin Christovale used the word to describe my work a few years ago. EKV: Erin is a curator at the Hammer Museum. KF: Yes, she is. She’s a wonderful curator, and to have someone I admire as much as her use such a word really stuck with me. Once I understood what the word meant and saw it repeatedly going to the Met and places I admire, it added weight to the work. If I engrain a term like that into my practice, when you see the works, you question: Are they sculptures? Are they these wonderfully marble soft but really hard and dense objects? What is actually being captured? What is the artist trying to tell us by using these words? How to play with that and explore, for me as the artist, opens up so many doors…it adds so much gravity.

I’m talking about Rodin, thinking about the idea of attending to history. The same thing with my painting. I paint because it attends to a certain history. I’m not attending to a history of painters who have just painted in the past 10 years. I’m attending to caveman paintings, I’m attending to John Singer Sargent, Picasso, Rembrandt, Alice Neel, Barkley Hendricks. The scope is really wide, and I think using words like grisaille envelops the work into different playing fields and meanings. EKV: Was there a specific moment that you realized that you wanted to turn the focus of your work towards people in your community? Was that very early on? KF: When I went to Otis College of Art and Design, I was always drawing in my sketchbook. I was drawing people while I was in class—constantly life drawing. Once I started to paint, I was painting a lot of other people’s references. I was painting stuff out of magazines, old images from books, things that didn’t belong to me or that I didn’t really have a connection to. But it wasn’t until my photography-lighting studio class, when we would bring someone in to photograph. . . I would run out and talk to all my friends and say, “Hey, who wants to come by? Who wants to come in the studio?” Photographing them in that way, with the lights and the big Canon camera, and the whole setup, and seeing the images, and then also seeing their reaction: “Whoa, that’s me”—that told me “Okay. There’s something here.” EKV: You’re [also] bringing your parents into this through your design. You’re channeling your parents. KF: I am, 100 percent. One of the first jobs I had after college was literally designing clothes. My dad always clowns me. He’s, like, “For years you were talking about, ‘I don’t want to do what my parents do,’ and the first thing you go and do is what?” But I worked at a design studio, I was the only designer there. I learned how to do Illustrator on the job, doing T-shirt graphics, designing tops and bottoms, photographing a campaign for Kohl’s, all in the same week. The whole experience taught me a whole lot, it was such a beautiful experience because I got to be, like, “I can do all this.” EKV: There is actually a fluid intersection between fashion and art in general, but also specifically in Dallas. We are on Commerce Street, the gallery that we took over is a former boutique, and we are next to the original Neiman Marcus. KF: When my parents made clothes together, Neiman Marcus was one of their clients. P