GREMLIN: A Conversation between FOYER-LA, Museum of Commerce, & Nick Herman

CW: You both describe a shared interest in how the vocabularies of propaganda and superstition overlap, especially in myths of technological progress and futurisms. Propaganda seems to trade on fear, while superstition possibly stems from confidence. Where does GREMLIN live in that overlap?  

NH/MOC: A gremlin evokes the queasy boundary that seems to divide humans from everything else. That’s where GREMLIN lives. The aesthetic and formal vocabularies we use in the project point very specifically to that duality: fear of the alien mixed with a kind of techno-optimism and mystical pursuit. Historically, the gremlin embodies exactly this ambivalence: the fear of losing control and of unintended consequences. 

CW: While experiencing GREMLIN, I find myself disoriented a bit in space and time. Nick’s ceramic vessels feel both ancient and futuristic. MOC’s "hyper-saturated feverdreamscapes" have a physicality that betrays their digital production. This interplay between the analog and the digital is maybe really about time. How does time operate between the two bodies of work in GREMLIN? 

NH/MOC: Most ritual is about marking time, and that is fundamentally about the body, about connecting the small “I” to a larger, more fundamental force. Getting back to superstition: it’s a bid for control, but it's also a way of governing that alignment. The occult is premised on this idea of a hidden structure, which leads to both paranoia but also something else, something visionary. 

As for the analog and the digital, the noisy imagery in GREMLIN, both in MOC graphics and NIck’s ceramic surfaces, evokes a kind of mimicry where one entity absorbs and adopts the properties of another. Roger Caillois writes beautifully about this spatializing of desire: the way art mirrors nature in this overlap, and how the overlap gives rise to a kind of dissociative madness. That’s why the line between the digital and the analog is blurry. They share the same DNA.

MOC: On a more technical level, using very simple graphic moves and doubling down on the pixel places a deliberate emphasis on planned obsolescence: a flailing graphic language based on the soon-to-be-antiquated phone and computers that hold our soon-to-be-extinguished lives. It’s the allegory of the zombie, of technology that keeps haunting us. 

CW: There is a recurring circularity in GREMLIN, a representation of seemingly closed or self-contained systems. MOC, your process involves repeatedly reworking imagery and displaying in multiples, often adjacent to your son and his bandmates, as they construct and reconstruct their electro punk music as PIT. Nick, your sculptures contain a circular flow of fluids, air, and generated sounds, often housed in the belly of the pedestal, implying integration. Are these loops a form of ritual?

NH/MOC: That’s really the question: does art still function as a medium of ritual, even when so many people are vehemently against religion per se? GREMLIN obviously can’t answer that, but it's clear that the underlying logic of animism, the sense that there is a force within media, something like what Benjamin would call aura, remains vital to how art and society still function. Language fails us, but the way people act suggests that occult beliefs remain central to technology and to our longing to connect—with each other and what lies beyond. We want to make work that crystallizes that contradiction for the viewer. 

CW: How do you each understand the space of the pedestal? Nick, yours are both integral and functional. They support the ceramic sculptures, but these constructed substrates are systems in themselves, generating an interior in relation to an exterior. MOC, you’ve chosen to skin the exterior, activating FOYER-LA’s long red facade and inviting others to mark it in response. Inside, the prints are pinned or stapled, and some hang freely, curling at the base, occupying a subtle but three-dimensional space.

NH/MOC: Hierarchy, like it or not, is always at work in nature, and the pedestal functions that way, as an amplifier or frame. It obviously links back to the altar, a word that simply means something “higher.” The pedestal is a kind of grammar, and, as such, it connects us to ancient technologies of communication, where sculpture serves as a conduit much like the gremlin does.