Renegotiating How We Move through the World: Kahlil Robert Irving in Conversation with William Hernández Luege

Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts

Kahlil Robert Irving looks at a gallery model in his studio, 2022. Photo by William Hernández Luege. Courtesy the Walker Art Center.

How does spontaneity allow for new possibilities to emerge? Can clay be used to abstract our daily world and transform it into something new? American artist Kahlil Robert Irving explores these questions through a sculpture practice that incorporates ceramics and architecture. On the eve of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present, Irving sat down with exhibition curator William Hernández Luege to discuss how sculpture can be a tool to process the complex world around us.

William Hernández Luege

For those who might not be familiar with your practice, what can you tell us about yourself and the work you do? 

Kahlil Robert Irving

I’m 30 years old and I live in an area of St. Louis that’s called the State Streets, where I have a studio I bought a year ago. It’s become a building in which I make things. I think about a lot of different stuff, and then I make objects that relate to the folding in of those thoughts that I’m having day to day. A lot of what I do is intuitive and in the moment. It is shaped by what I have available to me. I’m not necessarily always seeking out the answer or looking to find something that solves my questions. It relates more to the sensitivity of desire and what can be done with a series of different forms or materials.

It’s quite liberating to be able to work in this way because so many other parts of my life come with lots of constraints. This is in part due to the inherited reality for non-white folks. The practice of making art for me is developed in relation to processing the world around me. 

WHL

Processing the world around you is a great place to begin. It relates to your body of work that I first discovered, the amassment sculptures.

KRI

Those sculptures are created out of various objects around me. I collect them and later in the studio I intuitively construct them into makeshift molds. The sculpture is then dried for several weeks before being fired in a kiln. Once the form of the object has come into existence, the surface is collaged with imagery—information and photographs—that either I’ve taken or are found. This creates a cacophonous language around a reference to decay or deconstruction, which is pulled together in one space through an extreme amount of force required to create the object. 

It’s about three-dimensional concrete poetry. But instead of just using text as a means to create form, the sculptures use three-dimensional forms, flat images, as well as legible and illegible information simultaneously. The work is very much about poetry in 3D. 

WHL

A theme we’re thinking about in relation to your exhibition is the role of collective memory. How do you see what you’re assembling connecting to personal and collective memory? Is it a matter of finding the sculpture’s form, or is there something about each of these components that you want to weave together to create this kind of poem?

KRI

I don’t mean poetry in the sense of a literal poem that someone writes. I’m talking about the imaginative and sensitive emotional style of expression. I don’t care if anyone understands everything that’s going on in the work because that’s not the point. It is about something that once existed more than it is about your getting the point. 

This work has never existed before, and that means the possibilities within this object are still yet to be revealed. It’s not true to say that there is a message or statement I want you to ultimately walk away with after seeing my work. That would defeat the purpose of what am I doing because I want to give the viewer the same kind of intuitive engagement it takes to construct the object. There is a spontaneity that can only exist when you encounter something for the first time. Especially if it’s something that disrupts what you are expecting or forces you to pause.

For instance, a protest disrupts what you expect to happen on a regular day. It makes you spontaneously engage with something you couldn’t have planned for, and that experience allows for something new to emerge. These kinds of disruptions are not necessarily meant to signal that something is wrong, but often they do. When you approach a sculpture of mine, specifically the sculptures we’re discussing, it’s akin to a protest.

WHL

How did you start introducing the tile-based works into that line of thinking? With that work, you’ve created series of tiles that are arranged in grids, and they have a more direct textural relationship to the city street.

KRI

The street sculptures were initially made as works on paper, and the goal was ultimately about trompe l’oeil. It is about making clay look like things from life and doing things that no one has necessarily seen it do before. Making clay look like asphalt or making paper look like asphalt is about invention. 

Initially, the street works were monotypes made on paper using a process for making collagraphs. In that process, there is a matrix that has a texture which you print from. I don’t glue down my texture on the matrix, so I can move those things around. The process allows me a certain flexibility with the sculpture. The ceramic is more durable so it can get even closer to looking like the street.

Any work that I’ve made that looks like the street is always in relationship to the juxtaposition of the street and the sky mirroring one another. I live on this ground, but I have been told from a Eurocentric perspective that the answers to my dreams come from above. There is a tension of the ground being the place in which I exist, but my dreams and goals should come from an unknown space above me.

It’s a challenge of architecture. That leads into the exhibition at the Walker, where the viewers stand above the sculptures on the ground. The viewer will be placed between the ground and the sky.

WHL

With the exhibition at the Walker, Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present, you’ve created a platform that viewers will stand on in order to view the sculptures inset into it. This made me curious about your approach to architecture and how you see your work sitting in it. 

KRI

The work at the Walker Art Center is a large-scale installation that presents a series of different works, which are the next evolution from my previous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and a collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem. Those previous exhibitions pushed the viewer to look around the room as a sort of content map, whereas the Walker Art Center exhibition is more of an experiential opportunity for the viewer to be more physically involved. The sculptures are recessed into the platform beneath the viewer, and some objects protrude from that platform. It allows the viewer to get closer to the work.

The structures protruding from the platform are objects and parts of the installation that developed out of my interest in how ceramics has been used in industry. I worked with Mission Clay Products to produce the large-scale pipes. Additionally, I worked with brick to construct the work Stele [(A scraper)] to reference the history of Minneapolis being a city built out of brick. These references to 18th, 19th, and 20th-century architecture are a reminder of the people whose labor built the spaces people occupy today. Even though those things may be distant or illegible, there’s still room for them to be acknowledged. 

WHL

What role does abstraction play within this work? 

KRI

Artist Lorraine O’Grady believes learning is not through the process of repetition, but the process of putting several things together. When I went to college, I learned about how abstraction is turning something into something else by the degree to which it is altered. When I think about abstraction, I’m putting a series of things together in a room that have not been seen together before. It illuminates the space between my intent and my impact. Even though I may intend to do X, the impact leads to whatever, and I don’t know what that will be until it’s in the space. It is just as new to me, the person who made it, as it is for the viewer.

WHL

You mentioned how each new installation of your work builds and grows from the previous one. Where do you see your work developing after the exhibition at the Walker? 

KRI

The Walker Art Center exhibition is the first exhibition where I take over a space and use the budget to add the viewer into the work. It allowed me to present my work in a completely different way than I’ve ever done before. I think that’s very important, not only because of the opportunity but because of what I’m desiring in my work. When I was in college, I studied ceramics in the daytime with the faculty who were leading the program, and at night I was learning about contemporary art from people on YouTube. Understanding and seeing the world mitigated through a specific kind of lens from a specific faculty that had a very specific agenda that they wanted students to learn from. But I knew that the contemporary art world was a place I wanted to be and a place where I knew my ideas would be respected and understood a little bit more.

The work at the Walker is at a scale that’s completely different than what I’ve been able to do before. Moving forward, I will continue to think about the architecture of the room in which I’m presenting work, making sure that that is in dialogue with what I may bring to an exhibition. I’m also thinking about that in relation to my history. It’s been almost 10 years since making my first sculptures in this way. What does it mean to be making my history in relationship to these sculptures? It is a constant negotiation and renegotiation of how we move through the world. The abstraction of living is, in itself, a complicated thing.▪︎

Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present is on view at the Walker Art Center from February 23 to January 21, 2024.