Kasper Kovitz

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

I make work about the wish to possess a place, and about the structures — cabins, hearths, fences, targets, clearings — through which that wish comes to look natural. I learned how strong the wish is by giving in to it. Living for five weeks on an island in Nova Scotia, I found myself cutting perfectly rectangular corridors into the brush, patrolling the shoreline, and once fetching a rifle for what turned out to be a woodpecker. I understood what the place was doing to me only afterwards, and only by the evidence. Since then I have worked at both ends of that transaction. In the paintings, a found landscape — a postcard, a real-estate view, a wildlife-camera record — carries a drawn dwelling laid over it, sometimes loud, sometimes so faint the imposition passes for the view itself. In the sculptures, a head taken from a police shooting target stands in the room as the one doing the looking: a figure whose whole existence is being aimed at, set on a table to watch the other work in the room. Some of it is made to stand under no name at all, where authorship would only get in the way. I choose materials for what they do rather than what they are: tree sap that stays invisible for a year, predator urine, ox blood, wool woven by hands other than mine. I want them to misbehave so that I have to adapt. Nothing I make will change anything. I make it as a bet that something could.

Artwork