A rather soft-spoken but jovial individual, Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Baliwas’ work had caught my attention earlier in 2024 after I came across documentation of his arresting solo presentation, Skin 2 skin, at Theta gallery in New York City. What attracted me to his work is the unconventional use of material, operating like an intermezzo for an aesthetic event that echoes what the late conceptual artist Pope L. referred to as the “creamy nougat center” of texturized art, “unfortunately not available in images.”
Simultaneously slick and striated, perfectly overwhelming and rudimentary, Baliwas’ unfurling, light forms—borrowed from the material valence of logistics—are located somewhere between image and sculpture, existing obstinately outside the conventions of these mediums. They capture a refreshing sense of the possibilities of contemporary practice and a capacious dialectic that presents itself as a mutually informing refusal to obey the fraught and insipid stakes of modernist gestural acts.
Following a moment where we both found ourselves less busy, I managed to catch up with Baliwas to get a fuller sense of his practice. —Mark Pieterson
Mark Pieterson: First, thank you for sending your recent mix over to me. You and I were jokingly discussing how the mix didn’t include any tracks from Playboi Carti’s recent release, I AM MUSIC, specifically the tenth track “Backd00r.” I want to begin by focusing on the linguistic resonance of the backdoor as an errant gesture, salient in both the song and your work. I find that the best way to approach your pieces is less through legible concerns of form, but rather through what you noted in the text you wrote titled “Skin 2 skin: B-side” as an “attunement to the lower frequencies.” Can you elaborate on this idea and how it relates to your practice?
Chris Baliwas: Absolutely. While it was a missed opportunity not throwing some Carti in there, I’m glad you led with this. I watched an interview with sibling rap duo Clipse, where they give credit to Carti’s “post-structural” style and lack of technical rap abilities. That interview helped me understand this starting point we’re at for this conversation. This attunement to the lower frequencies for me has so much to do with being unconcerned with technical skills and the “european mode,” as Audre Lorde might call it. The tendency by Carti and his label mates to stray away from the accepted standards resonates with me.
In my practice, intervening in unconventional ways with inkjet prints is central: whether I trace onto, pull apart, or tear the substrate, the point is always to confer a haptic sensibility with the material as a feedback process. I feel liberated from the standard way of handling that paper and the power that holds over me. A lot of what drives my practice and insecurities is this sort of doing away with technical skills—a gravitation towards a negative capability, to be okay with not knowing.
MP: Interesting. And in many ways, this negative capability exists before and beyond language.
CB: Very much so. My current understanding of this is informed by writers like Audre Lorde, Nathaniel Mackey, and José Esteban Muñoz. They offer me a position to have a grounded relationship to what’s about to be birthed, a relationship with death, the underbelly: a sense of brown.
MP: I want to focus on this “sense of brown.” Because in that same accompanying text that you wrote for your solo show, you poetically state that you are “becoming aware of the quality of brown.” There is something considerably poignant that feels urgent here, and I wonder what you mean by this?
CB: To be completely honest, it’s a bit difficult to locate the words right now. I think mainly because I haven’t been able to do much reading of academic texts, or even to think about my art practice, since the end of last year.
I think it has a lot to do with how the year started and how it’s been going for many of us here in the United States with the new administration, especially for Angelenos. But one way to expand on this idea of “becoming aware of the quality of brown” that has come up for me recently after directly witnessing increased police and military presence in my neighborhood, including an ICE kidnap and assault on two American citizens is: What are some of the things the color brown asks of us, or how are we confronted by it in our day to day?
MP: I like this idea that it has less to do with the color in itself, but rather conceiving brown as an instigator of relations. This way of thinking about it is quite capacious in that brown is abstracted as a “being with,” revealing overlooked conditions that give way to an understanding of how we come to be.
CB: I consider the Filipino folklore my parents would share, like that of the duwende/nuno sa punso. According to the mythology, the duwende is a creature unseen to the human eye because its flesh is made of the earth’s soil. It often lives in ant hills, causing illness or inflammation to anyone who disrespects [the ants] or their home. These stories acknowledge the spirits and creatures of the earth when walking through spaces like dark alleys or stepping over graves in the cemetery when visiting loved ones. It’s about an awareness that certain things/people/histories have always been present, despite our not having a visual acuity of their presence. This way of being is structured by a different kind of knowledge system that gets buried or elided. In my practice, I find that this shows up a lot in the process of making, in the things I’m pointed to, and in what the work might point to.
MP: I’m also curious how your choice of material plays into all this. Because while polypropylene tape is meant to adhere and hold, it overwhelmingly betrays this teleology in your work by actually creating and unpacking something uncanny that cannot be held and escapes containment; a seemingly fugitive state that can be registered as a kind of “care work.” Here, I’m thinking of the piece 50999 6 99588 1 6 (2023), a floor sculpture featuring ruffled packing tape placed on top of an off-white base, which is delicately affixed to a languid, upside-down, opened cardboard box-turned-pedestal.
When I look at works like the aforementioned and TBLP 1007 (2024), for example, I’m reminded of what theorist Renu Bora refers to as “texxture” in the essay “Outing Texture.” In that they not only bear the processes of their making, but offer a space of haptic interchange dense with felt information: amongst other things, the crinkling sound of plastic, the slithery smoothness of surface, external relations, etc.
CB: I like this idea of “texxture.” That reminds me of Tina Campt’s Listening to Images and this whole idea of the image and its quietness. To go back to an earlier question, these are some of those qualities of brown that come up for me: what’s left over from me peeling, tearing, and indexing the remnants of my body and the materials I’m working with, and what reveals itself in the process. My material of choice plays a large part in contextualizing and reifying those ideas of transference and (un)archivability that anchor my practice. It feels similar to the music I make, too. I think things just accumulate so much, the words finally spill over into a different space that couldn’t have been imagined from the beginning.
I had been a shipping manager for a decade before the urge to use packing tape in my practice came up.
MP: Ahh, cool. I was wondering how you arrived at the material you use because, quite frankly, it’s so matter-of-fact and conventional while, at the same time, uniquely beguiling and imbued with so much affect. Like, why haven’t I seen this before until now, you know?
CB: I hadn’t realized what knowledge my body was holding onto throughout all those years of packing up products into rigid boxes until I found similar conditions or movements of the warehouse space in the studio. That rigidity is what stuck with me the most and spilled over to my understanding of how the inkjet papers might function as well. I think early on, what interested me most about the packing tape was how it was always used in service to the rigid structure. So, after years of experimenting, having the tape intervene and combine with the photo inkjet print, I was quite relieved when the tape itself was the sole material to be confronted with.
MP: When we spoke in January of this year on the occasion of your participation in the group show titled Christopher Baliwas, Mark Verabioff, Erin Calla Watson in Los Angeles, you showed me a scrapbook that you made, I believe, with your daughters. How has becoming a father shaped you as an artist?
CB: There have been many times I’ve thought about the purpose of pursuing all this. Many days and nights filled with doubt. It definitely feels more heightened since becoming a parent. But I’ve learned, from conversations with friends, that it’s probably more important for my kids to see me pursue this thing, even if I fail, than to drop it all and quit. So I’m always navigating this with them in mind. It’s important for me to make the time to step away from the to-dos of the art world in order to be with my family. [My daughters] seeing this pursuit of being an artist is putting them first. Ultimately, my faith as an artist and in how the cards fall has grown.
MP: Are you, to any extent, digging through your heritage to form more connections to Filipino material culture for their and your sake?
CB: Actually, yes! I’m doing some actual digging, but for comic books. I’ve never really been into comics or graphic novels up until this point. I may have had a very short stint with Wolverine comics as a kid, but other than that, I’ve never had an interest until just a month or two ago.
I’m quickly learning Filipino history related to comics and about the “first wave” of artists in the Philippines that DC hired in the early 1970s to work on their war and ghost titles, Batman and The Joker. There’s an essay I came across just last week by Lara Saguisag titled “Labor in the Margins: Filipino Comics Workers in the US Comic Book Industry,” and apparently, the reason Filipino artists were hired in the first place was due to labor antagonisms. The essay details how DC executives heard murmurs of a union being formed by the American workers. In order to mitigate the risk of the company going under, the executives took a trip to the Philippines and found cheaper labor.
MP: Wow, I had no idea.
CB: I thought I’d found a new leisure hobby that I could enjoy with my girls, but learning this last week has flipped the way these books feel in my hands. They’re heavier.
MP: This is probably a trite question to ask, but what are some records you simply cannot put down? And also, artists who have influenced your thinking?
CB: Maurice Ravel’s “Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn” and Nina Simone’s cover of Babatunde Olatunji’s “Zungo” are two that have stuck with me for the longest, especially in my early stages of thinking about an attunement to lower frequencies. There’s a particular version of “Zungo” that Simone did in 1961 for a TV broadcast, Camera 3. It was pressed on vinyl by UpFront Records. I gravitate towards [that record] most. In the last year, Theo Parrish’s “Took Me All The Way Back” and Ice-T’s “Squeeze the Trigger” have me completely losing my mind. Hope to one day hear them played out. Lastly, seiji oda x Trunk Boiz’s “NO FILLINS²” has been a much-needed summer jam for me and a nice addition to this trend that some Bay Area artists are doing of revisiting their classics for 2025.
As for some artists that have influenced my thinking, Milford Graves and Q-Tip have been big ones in terms of an errant approach to their practice. Phil Chang, as well, when it comes to thinking about the potential of materials in photography. LA-based Michael Queenland has also influenced me with his thoughts on form and how it often comes from personal history, process, and place. More recently, and to call back “the backdoor” from earlier, Jack Whitten has been someone I turn to when it comes to language around material and just sheer belief in what one does and the spirit that moves through them. I have a page saved in the first publication dedicated to him, published by Hauser and Wirth, titled Notes from the Woodshed where he states: “I AM COMING THROUGH THE BACKDOOR.”
MP: Jack is the don and a member (as the song goes), to say the least! Unfortunately for us, you recently deactivated your Instagram account, so it’s difficult to keep up with what you have going on. Anything you have planned that you’re looking forward to and don’t mind sharing?
CB: I’m hoping for direct contact with folks through email, text, or in person. I’m planning on continuing to build my comic book collection. Blue Note Los Angeles is opening soon, and Derrick Hodge will be performing in December. I’m also looking forward to the new Clipse album, which is dropping soon. I don’t have anything in the pipeline art-wise, though.