Arts

Mike Leavitt Talks Trash with New Exhibition of Mutated Fake Out Branded Sculptures

Published 2 months ago iNFO Vi2m ago • Bookmarks: 30

Your piece “Little Carbon Footprints’ is a Little Tykes Cozy Coup ride on toy, constructed fro m four upcycled wood pallets. It’s pretty faithful to the original. Did you have a Coup laying round to reference?

Doesn’t every parent? Ours fills with rainwater out in the yard. And yes, I definitely used it for reference, measured or stenciled just about every part off of it. That was probably the most fun piece to make in the show. My daughter, age 5 now, loved it, still does. Besides using another kind of salvageable commercial waste – pallet wood – my motivation was really to recall the long moments of isolation as the parent of an infant during the pandemic, mindlessly pushing her in laps around the yard in that plastic toddler car. She’d be perfectly happy riding in her little car, facing forward, turning the steering wheel to nowhere, honking the horn, oblivious to the perils of the world around her. While I’d be pushing her, unseen in the back, with a heavily forlorn look hanging over me, brooding about the present, crippled thinking about the future. I really wanted to turn back and face that moment; face that demon and process that time by re-making the toddler car in wood. And now I can look back on that moment in time with a smile, albeit bittersweetly.

There’s a tribute of sorts to two companies who are based in Tacoma. Can you tell us a little about From Tacoma to Mars and Back Again?

The Mars candy company was originally founded in 1991 by Franklin Mars in Tacoma, Washington, just south of Seattle. Tacoma also happens to be where Fox News is licensed to broadcast here locally. Growing up, pre-9/11, Fox was the fourth local news channel affiliate after NBC, ABC and CBS. I never thought much of it. They seemed more fun, showed more sports, and licensed the cooler edgier syndicates like Married With Children, Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I feel a little personally burned by them, now with Fox News being what it is, having grown up consuming so much of their product, that I definitely wanted to take aim at them with this show. So when I found the local connection to Mars Wrigley, I ran with it.

I recently saw a posting somewhere (ironically) that a Gem Z’er truly believed that public phones was something that might not have existed, that was just a device seen in movies. i don’t get the “Birds Aren’t Real” level logic, but pay phones are odd to see. They appear so busy and appear to be giant bacteria magnets. We truly put our mouth on receivers out in the wild! No wonder we were so sick as kids. Your satire-infused version of the pay phone “Macintosh Killed the Public Phone Call” is infused with Apps up top and the forebodingly friendly Apple logo…

Oh I just revel in it. I’m driving this old 1978 VW bus around these days. I gave a ride to a friend in his 30’s that didn’t know how to buckle an old seat belt. Manually cranking the window was also a trip. And when I taught my 10 year nephew how to insert a cassette tape in a player, he wasn’t pressing the play button hard enough. “No, you gotta like, actually PRESS the button. You can just tap it.”

I think your other point about real things not actually happening just goes back to that whole detachment thing. The moon landing didn’t happen, right? The other one that got me for this show was this thing about discounting whether Wilt Chamberlain ever actually scored 100 points in a game… just because it happened so long ago and so few people actually saw it who are still around to talk about it. Hence the “Chocolate Chamberlain” shoes made with Hershey’s waste… because he scored those 100 points in the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania… where Hershey’s Chocolate was founded! I guess I just felt like I had my hands on so many different juicy elements for this show, and things really came together at some really nice crossroads.

This show is steeped with dark humor, for sure, but, with the amount of detail you’ve used to (re) create the works, I have to being that you, in a large way , love pop culture. If so, do you hate yourself for doing so?

I love pop culture enough that I don’t hate myself for it. It’s just part of me. It’s my history. It’s my every fiber of being.

Were you raised on TV ad its commercials? Is creating satirical works like ribbing a family member?

Look, I was born the year Star Wars came out. I was a latchkey only child of divorced baby boomers, left to my own devices for long stretches of time, kept company by the TV, cartoons, baseball cards, action figures and all the requisite commercial marketing that came with those things. If anything, I hate the marketers behind that – and those of the present day – who continue forcefully pitching to youth as a target audience. So yeah, pop culture, TV and commercials are A LOT like family to me. And ribbing them feels very familiar. I’m the kind of person who’s always gotten along with my friends and family – showing each other we love each other – by ribbing each other.

I can’t imagine that you are cloistered away like a jedi monk, these brands must feel like old friends to you. Does working in this type of satirical visual language feel like you are playing in a familiar sandbox, or feel like you are speaking in a comfortable dialect, like pig latin?

I definitely felt like that at times, especially deep in the middle of the process while making the work for this show. 20-something years ago, when I was just about to graduate from college, I’d decided I wanted to try to make a living at art but I had no idea how or where to start. I had tons of ideas. Too many ideas. The opposite of writer’s block. My prof told me that I had to stop filling sketchbooks with ideas; that I needed to start actually making something with my hands or he’d flunk me. So I decided to make something out of the sketches in my book. I thought of my ideas and sketches like inspirations, like flash cards I’d study. Then I expanded to all the other artists who inspired me. So the idea was – being a baseball card junky – I’d make trading cards out of my sketchbooks, along with the other artist who inspired me. For a while I considered making them into a deck of playing cards, so I could literally play with my options. And I’ve returned to that brainstorming mode a lot over the years. For a body of work, I can figure out my ingredients – the icons, elements or language I want to mess around with – but I almost never know at the start how to put them together. I imagine tossing them into a tumbler like lottery balls, or printed on the rolls of a slot machine where I can pull the lever to randomly pick various sets. I wouldn’t say they’re like old friends. I’d say the brands are more like frenemies. Sometimes we get along like oil and water. What’s that old saying about keeping your enemies close?