Jake Brush
Imposter Syndrome, 2023
“Imposter Syndrome” is the transcript of Jake Brush’s public program at The Shed, which was done as a part of his 2023 “Open Call” commission “Petpourri”. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Deja Belardo: I want to welcome Jake Brush, and also Sydney Fishman who will be joining him later on in the program. I want to thank all of my colleagues at The Shed who have made this exhibition possible. My co-conspirator, collaborator Eduardo Alfanso, who couldn’t be with us today; our whole team, Freddy Villalobos, MK Meador; our civic team, Darren; our resident DJ Phillip in the crowd; and the shed’s sponsors TD Bank Ready Commitment, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Howard Gilman Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Shed Creative Council, and New York State Council on the Arts. With that I will pass it over to Jake and let's have a good time.
Jake: Let’s go TD Bank! Thank you guys for coming, I wasn’t in the mood to do a whole thing so I’m glad it’s an intimate group today. I’m very happy with it. But yeah welcome to the talk, we’re going to look at some stuff and get into the project “Petpourri” and what happened in the period of time between applying for The Shed’s open call, and working on the project. Because when I originally proposed the project, “Petpourri” was quite different.
When the project started, it was all about this YouTube channel called “Petpourri”. The titular youtube channel of “Petpourri”. This YouTube channel is a record of Marc Morrone’s show “Petpourri”, which was on television during the late 1990’s to early 2000’s. And this is the only relic of the show that I could find, and at this point I had already been looking for additional material for two years. I really couldn’t find anything outside of the shit that he did with Martha Stweart. What’s really unfortunate for him is that this is sort’ve a greatest hits reel of his worst moments. Everything is about the pets getting hurt, the pets not cooperating. Or “Gross Animals,” which is a video compilation of animals shitting and pissing all over him. The last video, “Bad Callers,” is all prank phone calls. People would call in with these obscene comments and Marc, on live television, would have to react and move through this embarrassing situation. I’m from Long Island, and Marc Morrone still has a store there called “Parrot’s of the World''. So, when I first proposed to do “Petpourri'' at The Shed, I naively went in there and asked him if he would sue me if I impersonated him and responded to this YouTube channel dedicated to all the worst things that have happened to you on live television. And his response to this was that none of it was bad. He had this revisionist history of everything being manageable and fine. The animals were on the table together so close because it was cold in the studio and not because he had no money or support.
So to him this was manageable and everything was fine, but I didn’t really see that to be true. The YouTube channel, which has been inactive since 2007, is currently still up if you want to get into it.
I had heard of Marc as a kid. But what had brought me back to him was a subreddit “r/videos” post titled “Possibly the worst pet show to ever air on TV” which was filled with a bunch of hate comments about how this was the worst animal show ever, and that this guy should be put in prison for animal abuse, that he should fucking die and all this crazy shit. When I asked him about this he just brushed it off saying that these were just nerds on the internet. It’s important to acknowledge that Marc himself has never been on the internet, he’s never had a smartphone – he has no interest in it. When I first proposed The Shed project it considered what these internet posters might be like, what they might look like and how they might act in relation to footage of animals and how it was tearing them apart and making them feel terrible. These are all pictures of Marc’s pet store that I had taken then manipulated and moved around to become a third environment hosted by a CGI animation of myself dressed as Marc. Sending this off to The Shed I was like “there’s no way anything is going to happen, because that would be crazy,” and pleasantly I was very surprised.
Something that allowed me to drag the story out of this CGI landscape was Marc’s book titled “A Man For All Species,” where he writes about how he was intrinsically born with this ability to connect with animals. Again, this is very revisionist history. Marc writes that he would go to school and ravens and exotic birds would protect him from other children that were mean to him, which is… definitely not true. But he doesn’t seem to have an issue with any exaggerations of the truth.
I went into “Parrots of the World'' a couple of times to talk to him, and to ask him if he wanted to be in this video, but it really never went anywhere. Honestly, I found it hard to establish a relationship with him. Talking to him didn’t top watching him on YouTube. By the third time I went to meet with Marc, I felt stuck in this repetitive thing. Everytime I went in there it felt like my first time meeting him. My connection with him just never really went anywhere. Which sucked because the connection to the subject is such an important piece for me. I work alot with my friends and with my family. The person needs to be more mold-able than what Marc was giving me. It couldn’t be this thing where I produced something with Marc similar to several other videos on YouTube, where Long Island 12 year olds go in and talk to him. He’s truly a Long Island celebrity so everyone goes in there with a fucking camera and asks him questions about birds and shit. As my interest in Marc Morrone the person faded I became more interested in the YouTube channel as an artifact, and the persona of Marc Morrone as a celebrity who I was weirdly printing photos of, researching constantly, and thinking about around the clock.
Once I sent the proposal for Open Call out, I didn’t think about it anymore because I didn’t believe it was attainable. I put the Marc infatuation on hold.
In this time a figure that was really informative to me was Uma Kompton. Who is a celebrity of “stan” Twitter which is basically just “gay” Twitter. And the story of Uma Kompton is all in her bio, she is “ A proud christian mother of three, anti- bullying advocate, sewerside survivor, and avon distributor.” She’s an extremely controversial internet troll who first appeared in 2015. The story of Uma is what is so applicable to this project, despite being such a hard left turn away from “Petpourri”, because Uma is very clearly not who she says she is. The photos posted to the Uma Kompton account are actually pulled from VK, basically russian facebook, and of a woman named Natila. And so someone was taking her photos and posting risque content that was frequently flagged for racist, homophobic, and pornographic rhetoric for which she achieved internet fame. The Uma Kompton project went on to produce hit songs such as “Stripping for Jesus” and a track about wanting to have sex with Donald Trump.
What is it about becoming another person, on the internet, or in media or in artwork that is so freeing? Uma is this sort of thing where Natlia takes all the blame. So this person can express these things that they want to express but can’t behind their own image, so they steal another person to do it. This is a horrible, and selfish, but extremely successful way of being an imposter. And is not completely dissimilar to how I play Marc or other people within my work. The difference for me, is that when I told Marc I was doing “Petpourri”, he told me he really didn’t care. He didn’t care what I did with my art project, and he didn’t want to see it. And it’s my opinion that he had been lying about himself, and creating a character throughout his whole career. Which made me feel even more welcomed into becoming his imposter as he was offering these really interesting exaggerations of his life on television and in his books.
On that same note there's Danielle from Big Brother 14. Big Brother is a show on CBS where contestants live under 24/7 surveillance. In a house of hundreds of cameras and microphones, the houseguests' every word is captured and streamed for fans to watch online. And so basically Danielle would lie about random aspects of her life that didn’t really affect the game. There was no clear strategic reason as to why she was lying about how her family invented laundry detergent and all this crazy shit. And what I had discovered between applying for The Shed’s open call and working on “Petpourri” is an article from Tamara Tattles which was a reality TV show blog. The blog was recently removed, and it's rumored that Tamara died. Rest in peace. Tamara had taken a compilation of things that Danielle said on the live feeds and in my opinion, restructured her lies into a prolific blog post titled The Autobiography of Danielle Murphree: A Compilation Of Her Own Words. (The blog post was deleted, here is the text):
“Dani’s father was not much help as he was a drunk Marine-Preacher who would try to teach her to swim by throwing her in the deep end of the pool screaming “Sink or Swim, Sweetcheeks.” Poor Dani nearly drowned in that cement pond in Alabama many, many times. That doesn’t even include the time that she and her Daddy were down at the swamp hunting alligators and Dani fell and broke her back. Her Daddy threw her over his shoulder and carried her home where the back magically healed itself. When times were hard, Dani would retreat to the three-story tree house her Daddy built for her in the backyard and practice her poses in the many mirrors she kept there. Sometimes she would just sit in her treehouse staring into her mirrors and thinking of happier times, like back when her great grandfather invented laundry detergent. It was that invention that made her entire family very wealthy and allowed Danielle to buy all the make-up she could ever want.She’s also developed myriad physical illnesses during her twenty-three years of life… Including alcoholism, anorexia, and cancer”
I made “Laundry Detergent (Cheers!)” based on this Tamara Tattles blog post. Basically how this was shot was grabbing my friends, and telling them about the blog post, and said that we should pretend to be on a reality TV show. And anytime you don't know what’s going on, just say that your parents invented laundry detergent, or that your parents are marines who abused you or that you had anorexia but it was cured with 20 ml of adderall. What was interesting was that even though we were pretending to be on TV and we were taking these really surface-level bizarre things that someone has said on big brother nearly 20 years ago, we were able to use those repeated terms to signify shifts in the dynamics between the three characters. Where it was constantly two verses one all the time. Two of us were constantly dogging on the other one. And that target would shift from person to person. Which I think mirrors the dynamics, allegiances, and feuds we normally see on these kinds of shows. It was really fun and confusing as fuck to shoot. My boyfriend was shooting it, and my two friends who performed in the piece alongside me (David Moses, and one friend who would rather remain anonymous) were like “what the fuck is going on?”. And the experience of shooting this project really reaffirmed that the collaborations with other people, while difficult and a ton of work, needs to be brought into my Open Call project.
A few months after filming this I got the email from Deja that the team wanted to meet with me about participating in Open Call 2023. I wanted to find a way to pull “Petpourri” away from Marc. I no longer wanted to do this flat CGI recreation of Marc's life. I wanted to lie as much about his life as he has himself. And really lean into the gossip, and lore to extend the project out of “Petpourri” and into a larger landscape. And part of that was by looking into other people from Long Island who are local celebrities. Other people from Long Island who were really getting the numbers on the blog posts.
In a similar but different way to Marc’s celebrity, there's this woman who runs up and down Merrick Road in Long Island wearing these tremendous headphones and doing extreme “hand-ography”. My mother swears she saw her smoking once while running and doing what some consider to be extreme sign language. I knew this had to be the opposite. The opposite to me being Marc. This enigma icon. “Petpourri” needed to start with me as this running woman, who transforms into being Marc through some sort of nervous breakdown. I found blog posts of people debating her mental state, which further solidified her as a must have in my work.
LI2South Posts
Hi, I was wondering if anyone had any information on the dancing woman in Bellmore? She dances mostly on Sunrise Highway around Hewlett Ave. with these HUGE headphones on.... Just curious....
Sean Sean Sean Responds
She had a nervous breakdown a few years ago, very sad. She's not dancing, she's actually doing sign language but gets really into it. Maybe she's listening to an instructional tape on those headphones? It's ALL she does sunrise to sunset, I've seen her everywhere between Meadowbrook Road, North Jerusalem and the Wantagh LIRR station.
mikev
There was no breakdown so you can put that rumor to rest real quick. Very simply, this is her way of getting extreme exercise since she was discriminated against by a gym in Merrick (i'll post the name of the gym if anyone is interested). She lost her membership there because she used sign language while walking on the treadmill and has chosen to keep herself in shape outside. She is actually a rational person that has concerns about how corrupt the world is and how misused the internet is and what little everyone is doing to correct all of the problems (locally and globally). The headphones are to listen to the radio and the sign language is an aid to help her to commit facts to memory. Despite their retro appeal, the headphones work just fine. I think she would be disappointed to know that people are wasting their time talking about her instead of cleaning up some of the real problems in the world.
Sean Sean Sean Responds
My bad, that's what one of her neighbors told me. Said she used to be a very sweet lady and just totally lost it one day. If there's nothing wrong with her, what does she care about people "mocking" her, then? Is it not a personal decision? She's got every right to behave however she wants but at the same time everyone else has the right to interpret this how they like, and honestly I doubt many people say to themselves "oh, that's perfectly normal!" as they see her spinning, twirling, prancing and running while doing EXTREME sign language with gigantic headphones that look like they came out of a WWII air traffic control tower. The other day I saw her staring down this guy in a delivery van signing right in his face and he looked so freaked out, it was very surreal. I know I should be finding a cure for cancer or whatever, but it just seems odd to me. She seems to have gained quite a bit of notoriety, perhaps she can use it as a platform to express whatever these mysterious things are that she wants to change about the world. Maybe you could enlighten us as to what those things are?
Reading this was this crazy realization of how surreal the day to day can be, through exaggeration and storytelling I had talked a lot about this with Armando, the cock fighting ring. But the distinction between lore, and myths, and that my work exists within that context through gossip and internet rumors. Which is like… the classlessness is never ending.
Like the rest of “Petpourri” it was filmed in the summer of 2023. For the running scene, again my boyfriend behind the camera is doing phenomenal cinematography work. Really making things happen on a budget. Doing this performance, I thought I was going to get stopped. Never happened. There were two women who were walking on the track while we were filming, talking about a broken air conditioner. And didn’t even pay attention to what I was doing, which was wonderful, because I was truly afraid about getting attacked while impersonating a local legend.
I decided to use the running woman as a character to pull the narrative away from Marc, and make it more of my own. Because it was just too much about Marc. Using another character would complicate the narrative and allow for a wider interpretation of the piece. But while still considering Marc, I was studying the sets that were made for his show “Petpourri” TV show. I started thinking about what happened to those objects, to those wall flats. As someone who works in Film and Television myself I was thinking about what happened to these set pieces. Could you imagine they didn’t just end up in the trash? A lot of times for film and TV shows if things aren’t just thrown in the trash they are used for other productions. Like If we build a White House – they will send the White House set away to appear in another series. I was watching the Chucky TV series, this is embarrassing to admit, but anyway there was this scene that takes place in the Oval office and I was watching it like “oh my god, I think i worked on that set for a different TV show over the summer!” These pieces travel with or without the show independently of the show. So I wanted to create a fake version of Marc’s set that was being used for a secretary office. So it’s taking the texture of the wall, the table, the window and resizing it for this room with these other elements to loosely illustrate that there are existing artifacts of the TV show beyond the YouTube channel.
This scene of “Petpourri” is this wonderful thing of taking all of the reference material and really teasing it out. It was my way of taking the project out from being isolated to just Marc’s show and into this universe. Because the people who were on reddit posting about it and talking about it on the dust collecting subreddit, were so angry with him. And so I wanted the character of “SJW Official” to embody their frustration and to be like, “If your goldfish dies, I will come over and execute you. And there is no hope.” And so my nephews played the twin brothers – they were fantastic.
Similar to the “Laundry Detergent” video, having personal relationships with the players in my videos, and allowing them to take pieces of their personalities to exaggerate a role elevated the characters to a new level. Where the performer comes into the set with their own life and experience, and perspective and is then introduced to my script and direction as a parasite that skews them into another direction. And I think that’s it for the excerpts, and reference material. How are we on time?
Syd: Good
Jake: Do you wanna come up?
Syd: Are you ready for me?
Jake: So ready. So I would like to welcome my friend and collaborator Sydney Fishman.
Syd: Hey Everybody! Thank you so much for coming, and for The Shed for having us and letting us play around. I really encouraged Jake to share the process with everybody because it’s special and really unique to the way Jake works. There is so much layering a building that happens in the process of making the videos. And the sculptures are new in a lot of ways because they’re sharing the way that this digital space, and universe that Jake’s able to create that reproduces the tangible world and I think it’s an important moment to make that connection with the public and people who are engaging with jake as part of his practice. We’ve been working together for a long time, and we met at a party and Jake showed me this demented video of, like, a strawberry. It was so just like, low grade, experimental, not even experimental because the world was always the same as you see it. It’s just that his mind–
Jake: –is extremely broken.
Syd: His mind was moving faster than his technique. And so I think it’s amazing for The Shed to see that and to support Jake as a lot of us have supported Jake, and it’s amazing to see the scale that the work has been able to accomplish and I feel very grateful for that. And it’s hopeful for all of us out here, trying our hardest!
Part of what I'm interested in learning is what y’all think. I was wondering if anyone from the crowd wanted to give a response to watching the “Laundry Detergent” video or “Petpourri?”. Does anyone want to give a sentence or two?
Audience: It was interesting seeing source material of people who are chronically online, and I understood the work as being a logical world where reading this sort of material takes place, so it was nice to see it reflected in the structure of the video. (Paraphrased)
Jake: Yeah, thank you so much for being nice. I was nervous when Sydney was like “does anyone wanna say anything?”, I was like “somebody's gonna stand up and be like ‘this shit is stupid!’", so thank you for being gentle. Yeah so, you’re totally right. It's taking a format of message boards or reality TV and working within that structure. Art can be so serious right? And there’s room, obviously, for that. But an artist doesn’t have to be serious to work with a material. You should be able to take whatever perspective you have and move with it in the direction you want. I’m very serious about the work, but the work doesn’t have to be as serious as I am about making it. And so I am interested in taking these references from like, the lowest of the barrel of like, shit. Googling what happened to Danielle from Big Brother 14. Is she married? Does she have kids? And what does she look like now? Whenever I go to bed, I want to see what happened to these people that have completely faded into oblivion. And then when I read posts on message boards, I think about what the posters are like, what other perspectives they have even though I only know a username and one post on some niche topic. My mind sort've just fills in the rest. So with Marc it was like, the posters hate Marc because they believed he abuses animals, maybe so much so that they want to murder anyone who is incapable of preventing an animal from dying?
Syd: To that point when you’re creating these characters that are built from real life people that are then taken through the internet. And we put our impression on them through that process but then Jake digitizes them in this way and then they take on an anamorphic existence. I think it’s fascinating because our minds don't go that far to make that transformation. And to see it replicated in the space that these videos create is really fascinating.
Jake: There was one video that I didn’t show, which was the introduction to “The Anna Nicole Smith Show.” Her body is drawn in this very voluminous way, and contorting in these ways that aren’t humanly possible. And when I think of Anna Nicole my brain connects almost immediately to that animation as a stand-in replacement of her. Through the avatar she’s symbolically transformed into this huge Jessica Rabbit figure who is capable of anything. And what’s funny is when you take my lack of skill in animating something, the characters are just broken. They look sort of human, they have my face, but they are incapable of moving like they are human, they have no life despite imitating people that do. The digital imitations become this other thing separate from me, and the subject I’m emulating.
With impersonating people it does get complicated. For the running woman of “Petpourri,” I had asked two friends of mine who I had grown up with if they could help me film it. I was like “I’m doing this running scene with these tremendous tumor facial prosthetics,” and at first they were like “yes I’m so down”. But then they called me back and were like “wait is this about the famous running woman?” (none of us know her name) and I told them “loosey, kind of. Yes but no.” Because it is but it isn’t. Just like “Petpourri” is, but isn’t, about Marc Morrone. To me, the running woman was this structure that I could take and use, and honestly I don’t believe it to be a disrespectful way. She’s on WorldStarHipHop. You can google her without even knowing her name, and you can read about her story. And my friends were just like “I’m not comfortable doing it.” And I respected it and it was fine. And there’s a point in time where I would’ve been like “oh, I’m not going to do it anymore.” But I didn’t feel like I was doing it offensively so I told them I was going to do it anyway. I’m going to go into the pet store like this! It’s going to be ok.
But there is a line, and then there's the other side of it. We had done this project a few years ago about this woman from Long Island who has sold sex out of a hot dog truck, and I play her. And that was more of dogging on her. I watch that now and am like “ugh, so mean.” There's just a way to mishandle material that can very quickly turn into like, Uma Kompton, versus, Jake dressed as this person, using a structure to fill it with a project or story. “Petpourri” is a very personal project. People watch it and can get to know more about me if they're smart enough to not be grossed out by the prosthetics, or just brush it off as something weird. It was strange to me to feel so vulnerable within a project that is about me pretending to be another person who comes to believe that they are a genetic clone of yet another person. But that’s where the risk, and reward come with making “weird” work.
Syd: We talk alot about this process of becoming someone else, through prosthetics, drag, and CGI animation. I think that “Petpourri” is very barebones, when Jake first showed me the script there were quite a lot of monologues. Where it’s Jake or whoever is performing at that point just really going for it. And I think it’s really fresh and new for you to be out there in the front of your work. I wanted to ask you how you feel about vulnerability in your work as an individual?
Jake: I think it’s this weird mix. There’s this urge to like trauma dump onto art. I feel like artists dont want to say that. But they all want to be like “this fucked up thing happened to me and i dont know what to do with it.” I would argue that figuring out what to “do with it” is everybody's journey in the 3D world. “This thing happened to me, where do I put it?”. I think it’s ok to be vulnerable in art as long as there's a way to connect it to a grander suffering so that the work can relate to a larger audience. Right? Because no one wants to hear someone just complain about their life. Whining and carrying on about, like, their pet that died? You know what I’m saying right?
Syd: Yeah. And you feel good about it, like you like watching yourself?
Jake: No I hate it.Thats why I've got all the makeup and costume on. It’s a weird mix of being vulnerable but also hiding inside the identity of another person as a way of expressing those things.
Syd: I also wanted to say that we have some people here who have been in the videos with Jake. If Sydney Watnick or Candystore would like to say something? Candystore, who worked with Jake on his video “Stop Being Poor!” which was made during his residency up at Wave Hill, and it's fabulous, what is it, how long is it?
Jake: It’s too fucking long! I have a revisionist history of that project. It’s so long, but basically me and Candystore did this video up at Wave Hill and framed it like a reality competition where the winner got to live there. And everyone who worked there was like “...what is going on…why does this have to happen here?”. (to Candystore) Do you wanna talk about it for a second?
Candystore: I was reminded of that video at some point during this talk, maybe it was during the “Laundry Detergent” video where you’re working with these people and giving a framework but just letting the performers fill the character themselves. Jake told me nothing.
Jake: Not a thing, I consciously got better with this part of “directing” for “Petpourri,” but at the time I really didn’t give any direction whatsoever.
Candystore: It was like, “watch this video of this tour guide at Wave Hill” and I was like “So am I her?”, and Jake answered “Yeah sure whatever you want.”
Jake: Such a bad alpha.
Candystore: I thankfully had this floral dress and just created this character on the fly. And it ended up being really funny, weird, and didn’t make a lot of sense. She repeated herself and said nasty things but it sounded fun and like “come to Wave Hill!” but it all happened in the moment.
Jake: Totally. We were driving up there and I was like “just watch this video of this woman from the New York Public Trust doing a tour of Wave Hill” and had Candystore to watch it over and over again. Because I knew Candystore was perfect for it and that you would just figure it out. And some people really like working like that, and some people don’t. I’ve had people in my videos be like “you’re a bad director,” and I’m like “Ok well I’m not a director.” And they’re like “ok well you’re not a good boss,” and I’m like “I’m not a boss but I like you in this so just try! Just shut up, copy the video and try!”. And Candystore is just great at that. Sydney Watnick is also great at that (to Sidney Watnick) – I don’t know if you want to say anything?
Sydney Watnick: I mean, the process of working with Jake was amazing (everyone laughs). Like, I like working like that. Like, the reason why I feel like I'm not a professional actress –
Syd: – the only reason –
Watnick: –is because I’d never be able to memorize all the lines. That’s the only reason (audience laughs). Jake just has this world and this imagination that is incredible and being able to be a part of such a specific vision. To be able to bring it there is a special gift. When I showed up to film I didn’t exactly know what I was getting myself into, but I was completely down.
Jake: So down.
Sydney Watnick: And it works as long as that’s the energy you're bringing to the project, like, I was there to help Jake execute Jake’s vision and be supportive, and that’s what we got to do together.
Jake: It’s like extorting relationships into their worst positions. Putting the worst wigs on people. And I appreciate that.
Syd: I just think too that’s the thing we get to see with Jake is the connection to the people that are in the videos. It’s working within a community and so much about this is about working with friends, people he meets and family. The characters of Long Island are his world. That’s who he grew up with and it’s really refreshing to know that Jake’s the type of person who considers and engages with even how the hot dog lady might have been misrepresented. It’s very thoughtful and considerate. So the work can push forward when the person behind it has so much thought and consideration for how to bring out different sides of people and take it to that line where Candystore is like, “this performance was one of my greatest stunts.”
Jake: Candystore, I have to recut it with more of you.
Mo: I liked the length – what is it, like 20 minutes?
Jake: No it’s like an hour – it’s way too fucking long. I over-thought it. But we have like ten minutes left. Mo, do you have any questions?
Mo: Have you ever considered doing something that doesn’t take place in Long Island?
Jake: Hater, get the fuck out of here (audience laughs). Well that’s the thing with the reality TV angle. Mo, I’m working on it. My brain is warming up to it. I’m branching out. Reality TV is going to be my canal into the real world.
Candystore: Your Drunken Canal.
Jake: My Drunken Canal, yeah.
Candystore: My question is sort of taking off of that– I wanna hear more about what about Long island is so influential to your work. There are these characters but I feel like there's an identity that you’re building with your work as a Long Islander. to my consciousness as a non-Long-Islander, I had no idea who the hot dog hooker was, or Marc’s Petpourri. This is all new to me but it’s very ingrained in who you are, so I wanted to hear to speak more to that identity as a Long Islander.
Jake: Yeah I mean it’s truly fascinating to just be like “I’m an artist from long island,” cause like, it sounds so store bought… My one brother was a Marine, my other brother is a gym teacher, and my dad is a construction worker. My mother and I unionized at a very young age because she’s a hairdresser and I’m gay so we were just instantly tight (audience laughs). I – (laughs) – it is this thing where there’s just so much untapped bizarre shit going on. And I think anybody from anywhere wants to make work about their life. About where they grew up, the people they knew and the stories they grew up listening to. And I think because these stories are, at face value, so stupid that most people would be like “I’m not talking about that,” but I actually think that’s way more vulnerable, intimate, more interesting. So it’s this building-up of this identity of people who have no place in a traditional gallery setting, putting them there and seeing what is going to happen. Not so much, “will people like this?”, but “what will people take from it?”. Like, I didn’t really want to get into all the details of the reference material because I like when people go to see my work and don’t really know what's going on. They can experience it fully, and leave the show feeling like it’s theirs. That it reminded them of parts of their own life. So I didn’t want to box it into anything, but for the sake of the talk why not?
Diago: Have you considered posting some of the content to reddit?
Jake: I used to do it in undergrad. Like I would make shitty “art” videos and like, my teacher would be like this sucks, or he would be like it’s really good, but it’s not great, and I would put it on reddit thinking maybe they would get me more. But reddit posters would be like “what the fuck is wrong with you.” They would just be like “this is weird.” They don’t like it, they don’t want to see it. Which is ok, it's not for everybody.
Syd: Maybe one more question?
Jake: Yeah we can’t end acknowledging the hate.
Audience 2: Thank you for sharing your creative process. It’s mesmerizing seeing how you put it all together. And I’m watching the video in the gallery and thinking to myself, this lady… (looks to Sydney Watnick) Was the dialogue scripted?
Jake: That’s the biggest problem with this work, is that Sydney watnick stole the spotlight. Everybody is like “who is this? Who is this star?”, and I’m like “she’s Sydney Watnick and she's mine…
There was a script to what we were doing but there’s always an energy of like, “What’s going on with you? The person, not the character.” Like my nephews when we shot their part of “Petpourri” reading all their lines. And the best part came when I was like “no more lines.” I was like, “tell me the story about your goldfish that you had when you were kids,” because I knew that the fish had eaten each other. So with the “SJW Official (Sydney Watnick)” piece of “Petpourri”, it was like “OK we're gonna do this phone call thing, and this time at the end you can break away and talk about your problems with men,” which she was, like, ready to talk about. So from behind the camera I have to see what people are ready to talk about that day and strike. Which is very similar to reality TV, right? Like, you want to cast people who are going to bring their own narrative so that you have a way to kick them off the show, or award them the money, or make a larger storyline. You want to work with the things that people are interested in because then they will really shine. After being so unstructured with my actors in “Stop Being Poor!” and “Laundry Detergent (Cheers!)” I wanted to give the performers a script that they would be able to follow. Lines, cues, etc. But what happened with both my nephews and Sydney Watnick is that when they were just reading the script, they fed into my storyline, but became flat and robotic. There had to be a combination of the structure and improvised personality. It’s a mix.