Jason Kofke explains 'Everythingalltogetherallatonce'

• JASON KOFKE
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Jason Kofke's Everythingalltogetherallatonce opened at Beep Beep Gallery this weekend, a solo exhibition of work that engages with ideas that try to explain the big stuff. As in, "all of human understanding" big stuff. Though based in Atlanta, the peripatetic Kofke is often traveling abroad - eastern Europe, China, and the Arctic Circle to name a few - and "keeping pulse with other parts of the world," as he likes to put it.

CL caught up with Kofke last week via email to ask him a few questions about traveling, sampling, and the big ideas that Everythingalltogetherallatonce tries to grapple with.

I've followed your work for a few years now and it seems that during that time you've always been either coming home from or leaving for a residency abroad. Where were you last and what were you making there?

It's funny you ask this. As I respond I am somewhat stranded in NYC (ran out of money as usual due to this solo show) wrapping up some printing projects with a friend up here. And I am catching up on the art scene in the city. So, as of now, New York is the most recent venture, though it's pretty standard. I was in the Czech Republic in March continuing the 'Everything Will Be Ok' (street art) project in a small town, Cesky Krumlov. Thus, a majority of the cute little Czech garbage dumpsters now say 'everything will be ok' (in czech language) in that little town. I made it to Prague, Lintz, and Vienna as well, seeing the museums and galleries, trying to keep pulse with other parts of the world.

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I'm curious about this idea of keeping "pulse with other parts of the world." How does your traveling interact with your work?

Directly, the materials and media I use often come from places I visited; I have a cache of Japanese 8mm cameras, Russian graph papers, a bunch of inks and stamps from China. I use these materials in responding to a place, but I also maintain my drawing style and subject interests despite location. Beyond media and tools, it is important for an artist to mediate their experiences of other cultures and beliefs, ideas and changes. Well, to mediate or translate. It is important to be not insulated by a single city, studio, or culture, but to take in as much as one can. I imagine a kind of Ouroboros - feeding off of one's experiences yet always recreating one's self. I view such activities as a role of an artist in a global village.

Despite these romantic ideas of art and a propensity for travel, I should be careful to claim being an expert, for I am not. I am a sampler - as I focus on studio practice and making work more than research and staying abreast of current events or trends. But when I do look into another culture, city, or art scene, I like to immerse myself, as it is more direct and genuine than reading articles. Artists I look up to, like Andrea Zittel or Marizio Cattalan, they are world travelers, participants in various cultures, international artists. hoping to mimic their careers, I opted to forgo establishing myself in a local scene before venturing out; instead, I tried to broaden my entire sense of 'local' to an international perspective (being in the 21st century, such is easier than every before). Also, such a methodology is, for me, less about decision and more about survival - always a noble initiative for a human - I'll end up wherever someone is able to host my work.

• JASON KOFKE
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When you describe yourself as a "sampler," do you mean that in the popular sense of the word? As in, someone who works with quotation and recontextualisation?

Well, yes. Yes I think that such is true of my work, but I meant I just bounce around places/topics/cultures - I'm not an expert on any of it, but try to grasp a bigger picture on how specific things are more largely interconnected.

As far as my work being 'sampled' I think it is an appropriate way to view it. Recontextualization is a very important defense, or justification for why I make (or use) many of the images I do. There are a few pieces in the current solo show Everythingalltogetherallatonce where I am re-drawing the images or data of the Voyager I spacecraft. Blatantly using these images that I myself did not invent can make me question my own creativity in image making, and make me feel guilty for using images as my own that someone else had to invent. But I justify these choices as a kind of authorship. The authorship of choice: If images are viewed as a language (which, to me, they are) then they are analogous to words. And I am simply choosing from an established vocabulary in order to convey a statement or idea via this image/language. Artists who invent their own images entirely - they certainly have their place, making up new 'words' - but I am not one of these artists. I am more of an author, or curator of images that are recontextualized in relation to each other in a panel, on a wall, or within the confines of a thematic exhibition.

So, the data I used from the Voyager is juxtaposed with forms of mathematics or mark making that I observed in Xi'an China researching (or 'sampling') ancient Eastern origins. Luckily I took sketches of these forms of counting and mark making and, sure enough, despite being 3000 - 5000 years old, they look quite similar to the mathematical system and marks that NASA sent into space in order to communicate with other potential intelligence. I couldn't invent the perception that such a 'sampling' can produce. It caused me (and perhaps the viewers) to consider that our message into space of our life and time in 1977 may not be intended extra terrestial intelligence, but for future human intelligence. Perhaps the disparity in knowledge between present and future 'us' is as distant as alien intelligence.

• JASON KOFKE
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Can you talk a little more about the work in the show? I haven't seen it, but I understand you're also drawing from a couple of other places aside from the Voyager data.

Yes, going along with the sampling of many things thread, for this show I looked at instances in recent history when (other) humans attempted to encapsulate all of human understanding, experience, or known material into one expression. I enjoy this theme because it is very much how I view things - in the bigger picture but at a loss of information in the details. So Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Elements became a source for images. And in the more contemporary, Dr. Garrett Lisi (a surfer/mathematician in Hawaii) has potentially mapped out the potential locations, orientations, and relationships of sub-atomic particles using a type of mathematics called a lie group. The idea of the theory is called the E8 and it could be this century's version of the Periodic Table (of everything), just as Mendeleev figured out a 'map' of every element and its relationship to teach other, this image/map may do the same on the quantum realm. It's exciting to get to relay these ideas through drawings.

Did you read that story about Voyager 1 leaving the solar system last week? Besides that being a really overwhelming milestone to think about, I was also fascinated by the fact that Voyager and Star Wars launched the same year - that the creative consciousness both in science and cheesy Hollywood movies was so fixated on the idea of deep space at that moment.

Yes, exactly! I get that. The week I was finishing the pieces based on the Voyager was the week NASA announced that the Voyager had left our solar system - the first object of man ever to be so far from home. I wish I could claim to have timed this show and subject in tandem but I think it may be a case of, as you say, collective conscious. It makes sense that Star Wars and Voyager would both 'launch' in the same year, because of our many social, cultural, technological - essentially human - interconnections. The same base cultural perceptions were present, but we see different forms or - the general manifests as different details. I had the same eerie timing last year with a show at Kibbee gallery where I exhibited a newly finished drawing of Neil Armstrong the week he passed. But that consciousness - or connectedness has shown itself over and over in recent history: Edward Hopper's paintings are often compared to and explained as 'cinematic' like movie stills. But in looking back we overlook that cinema was finding its incipient aesthetic language in the very same years Hopper was finding his. it is very unlikely that he was influenced by cinema in his early career but the two aesthetics are noticeably linked. Even Cubism - seems to have manifested in Europe and New York in the same years but with no direct ties. It draws perfect parallels with the elements in Lisi's mathematical map of quantum particles, each detail is separate, unique, almost unpredictable, but each moves and reacts in relation to each other. Pattern and - dare I say, reason - is only perceptible when viewed on a larger scale. Perhaps we humans are but particles reacting to each other in patterns too vast for our own comprehension? Sorry, that was a rant. But I am excited when my inclinations of the power of human interconnections are confirmed in little evidences. If we can cite George Lucas and Carl Sagan as such evidence.

Everythingalltogetherallatonce runs at Beep Beep Gallery through Oct. 19.