Cy Gavin

And if they didn't say yes, then you could at least audit it.

And it felt like a huge waste of an incredible resource to not... I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson is there.

You have this access to a crazy telescope.

Whatever you were doing in your studio could have been enhanced, whatever it is, by someone on that campus.

To not exploit that felt unwise.

A lot of these paintings were, it's like the beginning of me moving away from drawing.

Yet many of these actually do have drawing as a sort of starting point.

I allowed myself to deviate from that, but I remember that always being this kind of gear shift and being like, okay, throwing that away now.

And now it's becoming something else.

What you learn when you do that is that you immediately forget what you were so precious about and then you're precious about something else.

As far as people go in some of these paintings, like it was a bit, it was absolutely out of this moment, which is the kind of rise of Black Lives Matter movement.

And I had to kind of justify to myself what I was doing in the studio, if I'm going to be spending 10 hours a day painting or doing something else that's more immediate, like protesting or whatever.

I was very also interested in creating images that I hadn't seen exist in the world.

And I think the more that I thought about the language that was being bandied around at that time was really rattling around in my head.

Like matter, like what it does mean to matter and matter itself and what constitutes that.

And also I was thinking about making paintings that were more than just an image.

such that they would be singular and one to the next be very different.

So, like, these have different materials in them as a sort of way of seeing also how, on the few occasions where some of these were exhibited, how people addressed that or how, if they were, like, forensically looking for, oh, there's diamonds there or, like, whatever this there, not diamond diamonds, but, like, milling diamonds used for machining.

but how people assign value to this, that kind of carbon and not the charcoal that it's underneath or the whatever is in it.

Yeah, maybe like a cloak.