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Mushrooms in Paris is a new exhibition born from the collaborative efforts of Paris designer Murmaid and Los Angeles-based creative Darren Romanelli. On view at Over the Influence in Paris through August 30, the show transforms the traditional “white cube” gallery space into a surreal ode to the ethereal fungal kingdom.

Tied together by an affinity for upcycling, Murmaid and Romanelli turn to the natural order for inspiration, using fungi’s role as an agent of rebirth to inform their work as they, too, attempt to utilize decay as a means for creation.

In an industry that produces an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste every year, the exhibition explores ways in which this waste can be lessened. By leaning into vintage as a trend unto itself, the pieces consult how regeneration can serve as a convincing antithesis to overproduction. The project began during the pandemic, the thrust of the work taking place in Murmaid’s female-driven atelier in the heart of Paris, where, as the project’s creative director, she turned old jeans, zippers, hoodies, buttons, and other warehouse throw-aways into fresh new items — quilted coats, capes fabric display, lounge furniture, and more. “We were adamant, we don’t want to add extra waste into the fashion industry” says Romanelli.

Through the blending of earthy colors with psychedelic hues that pop, the exhibit reflects the noetic truth that unity can be found in the most disparate of things, and, in this case, using thread to eliminate the textural degrees of separation. The work is accompanied by a soundscape made by singer-songwriter and producer James Faunterloy, adding a cosmic dimension to the material sculptures that are scattered throughout the gallery.

As we examine the systems that govern the most basic parts of existence — our food, our medicine, our clothing, and the cycles defining their existence — through art, we're able to imagine and engage with a better world. One that values connection, sustainability, creativity — and which honors the key components at the center of it all. In this case... mushrooms.

Daisy Parris’ first-ever solo exhibition in New York is a marker of how far they have come in their artistry, growing from fine arts student in London to internationally recognized creator. But perhaps even more pronounced is their personal development, as each piece in The Warm Glow stands in as a tangible manifestation of raw feeling.

As each canvas is absorbed, onlookers traverse through the mind of the artist as they grapple with comprehending cumbersome feelings. Through serendipitous brushstrokes and intentionally emotionally-driven choice of color, muddled emotions make their way onto a blank slate, and suddenly, things all seem to make a little more sense. 

It is almost as if we can feel Daisy’s heartbeat pulsing through the cotton threads. Each technical movement widens the hypothetical fissure within Daisy’s mind, spilling the vulnerable contents out for others to see, and encouraging them to open up in the same ways.

office dove into this intimate experience with Daisy, below.

There are many different things that audiences can take from your paintings through their own interpretations. Do you usually have an idea of what a piece will look like in your head by envisioning it beforehand or do they come to be in a completely abstract way?

I think, in the beginning, I mostly have a sense of what colors I'm going to use. So it starts with colors or a feeling or an emotion. Sometimes in my head it's one thing, and then when I make it, it ends up as another thing — which is even better for me. Because then I can be surprised as well. I have a 'go-to' mark, so often it starts off with that or with making the canvas dirty and then responding to those marks. All of the marks I use are very emotional. So those are the starting points and then I just let it go where it needs to go, basically.

There's definitely this sense of serendipity that you can feel just by looking at the work. The exhibition is called The Warm Glow, which I think is very fitting because many of the pieces bring out emotions in audiences that maybe you didn't even know were possible. What makes you feel warm?

It started off as this womb-like gesture, you know? Like the warmth of a womb and how that leads to being nurtured and feeling safe. My cats make me feel warm. They're the most nurturing thing to me, but a safe home is definitely my goal in life. The paintings — they come from quite a dark place. But actually, there's a lot of hope and light in them and that's this thread of warmth that I want to radiate when you see them all together. So it's good to take them out of the context of the anxiety of my studio and actually see that there are elements of hope and lightness in there.

Definitely. I think that element of hope comes from the idea that when you're looking at the pieces, it feels that they were created by someone working through emotions, through this artistic process. So, this is your first solo exhibition in New York. What did you feel when you learned that you would get to showcase for the first time in a new city?

It's definitely a dream come true for me. And especially to have it in the Bowery, which is an area of New York I'm really fascinated by and obsessed with, because of Basquiat having a studio there and the whole art scene there. It has that grunge element that suits me and my work well. Being able to have my work in that context — my mind is blown. 12-year-old me wouldn't believe it.

It's amazing, and it's a very artistic area for sure. So I have to imagine that that is such a milestone.

There's such soul in the Bowery and in James' gallery.

Definitely. Going back to this emotional aspect — I know that a lot of this exhibition is about combatting grief and tough emotions. I saw them as the personification of dealing with those types of feelings. Do you think that there is any true reconciliation in the unexplained, or do you feel like one of the best, or only, ways to work through those feelings is an outlet, such as the visual arts?

I need painting and painting is my savior in that way. It helps me work through stuff because there's something about not having to use words for everything. It allows me the space to obsessively think about and reflect on what I'm going through personally or what's going on in the world universally. I can dip in and out whenever I feel like it. It's not linear, and grief isn't linear. And emotions aren't linear. They always circle back around. So painting helps me in that way. I think as long as you're thinking about these feelings, then there can be reconciliation. But I'm looking at one of my paintings now, one of the small ones in the show, 'Poem for hate and Poem for death,' and I'm thinking about the fact that the only way to reconcile with those feelings is to invite them in or confront them head-on.

Whether that's through talking, thinking, or making. In this piece, I'm offering poems for these things I'm scared of. I'm scared of death and I don't understand it, but I'm writing poems as a gesture to kind of make peace with it, or become friends with it, or just try to learn more about it. So I think if you're open to showing yourself off, then you can reconcile with it. But I think some of the themes I'm dealing with, like death — there's a universal fear and fascination with that. I don't think that's ever gonna go away.

Confrontation is sometimes essential for growth.

Yeah. It's all gonna happen; there's no stopping it anyway.

You have different fragments within your work from oil and acrylic to little canvas scraps to bits of poetry. Do you feel that you're able to communicate more effectively through this type of medium than spoken word, at times?

Yes, because I've always been in my own head. So to talk about these things verbally, a few years ago, that would've been impossible for me. That's when I started exploring it and painting so I could be honest or uncensored about it because when I paint, it's my private safe space. I have nothing to lose, but I have to kind of trick myself into not thinking about the fact that these paintings are gonna be shown. Because, otherwise, I'd be too embarrassed. And that's not productive for me as a human and as an artist. So I've learned to separate the fact that anyone's going to look at them. Also while actually making them, it's really important for me to disconnect from that because when I'm making such emotional work, the hardest part now is accepting that they are being shown and I have to talk about it. But it's good for me to learn to navigate that too.

I feel when looking at your work, it's like being brought into your inner workings and the world that goes on inside of your head. It's very intimate. How would you describe what your head space looks like in this state of mind, when you're creating?

It's quite heavy. Riddled with anxiety at the start, when I'm feeling an emotion so deeply — which I basically feel all of them deeply. So a lot of the paintings start from a dark place, but as soon as I've confronted that, it almost pours out of me onto the canvases. And often, it's quite hard to go to that headspace, to paint. And I don't wanna be an artist that always has to go to that emotional state to paint. I don't think that's very healthy, so I'm trying not to do that all the time. That's where the lightness comes in. But at the same time, my studio is the place where I can do that and explore my darkest fears, but also my biggest dreams and biggest loves. Whatever emotion it is, I'm trying to channel it to the highest saturation.

And once you work through that, there has to be an immense sense of relief.

It's such a relief. I'm looking back at this show in New York with James and one in January with my London gallery, and I'm reflecting on how I even made that work with what I was going through. But at the same time, painting's the only thing that's always there for me, you know? The best feeling is that I've been able to turn those emotions into something creative or beyond what they were originally.

Your pieces are so multifaceted and there's so much that you can interpret from them. But there were some elements, down to specific brush strokes or patterns, that I noticed carried over within certain pieces. Is that intentional?

Definitely. I use this sort of criss-cross pattern or singular brush stroke.

Yeah, that's the one I noticed.

I've been using it for a couple of years. That started off as a representation of the depth of agony or anxiety, but it's ended up as something that just represents a growing energy that's trying to reach out and touch everything. And I find it quite a scary mark because it can end up taking over everything. But when I'm painting it, there's this kind of push and pull friction of, 'How far is it gonna go? How much is it gonna take over the canvas?’ Or is it just gonna linger in the corner? Sometimes in domestic spaces, you can feel the energy. There's just something there. So it just represents that feeling that it could take over at any time.

You really do feel this energy in the exhibition and it draws onlookers in. I think in that way, it also appeals to the senses. You know, it comes alive off of the canvas. There are not only emotions that come with that, but maybe even a smell or a certain feeling.

Exactly. I can feel it crawling over my body or I can imagine that that's where it started. I used to just do it in darker tones. But I guess with some of the lighter tones I'm using with that stroke now, I'm trying to think about how the dark energies aren't always what they seem.

Yeah, or they can be understood or spun to not always have that dark connotation. I also appreciated that along with this very sensory experience, there's also a textural element, especially with your use of fur. I was very curious about your use of color as well. Do certain colors represent certain emotions within your work? Have you now reconsidered the colors you use when you are feeling a certain way?

Yeah, I've definitely reconsidered and re-adjusted my scale of color in relation to my scale of emotions. When you're young at school, they teach you that red is angry. I've never felt that — I've always somehow been aware that emotions and colors aren't that simple. It's not black and white in a sense. So I really developed my own scale of emotions in relation to color, but at the same time, nothing is set in stone, and everything's fluid. Yellow in particular symbolizes hope for me, at the moment. I find it a really healing color. I'm also really drawn to red and pink; it's that kind of warmness that we talked about. But, they can be so violent as well. So I'm interested in the extremes of those colors. They can be nurturing, but brutal at the same time.

That plays into the dynamic qualities of your work and gives it a lot of nuance. The fact that color interpretation is different for everyone makes it kind of an interactive experience as well.

I love that. I love how all of the emotions can exist at once.

This exhibition as a whole is about processing emotions in difficult times. Learning from that process, I feel, is probably one of the most important parts. What is one self-reflective lesson that you learned while bringing these works to life?

I think it was that survival is possible. It always gets better. And just to not be scared of death. Those are quite heavy things, but —

And it's a difficult thing to not be scared of.

Yeah. It really is. But just to kind of have a relationship with it and think about it. Try not to be scared of it. I also think that remembering that you're not alone in it is one of the key things I've learned.

Daisy Parris’ The Warm Glow is on display at New York’s James Fuentes Gallery until July 15th.

Born in DR Congo and raised in South Africa, surrealist artist Cinthia Mulanga constantly moved between homes along with her family, resulting in the domestic space establishing itself as the cardinal scenic world in her paintings. Inspired by the experiences and stories of visitors to her mother’s beauty salon, the young artist’s work evidently serves as an ongoing visual conversation and connective thread of those lived moments. Cinthia’s work boldly exudes familiar sentiments of intimate relationships and black family bonds, as she acknowledges her older brother as being her first point of knowledge about any form of artistic skill.

Experimental in her creation, Cinthia’s paintings evoke a narrative rooted in Afrosurrealism that allows her to spark dialogue between her juxtapositions of black beauty standards and stereotypical notions of what constitutes beauty in both the art world and real life. Her work often examines the emotions and thoughts shared by women in conversations of self-acceptance and beauty, utilizing mixed materials—from textile fabric to acrylic paint, from photograph cutouts to charcoal—as vehicles for unwordable expressions.

In our brief but delightful conversation, Cinthia blithely shares her thoughts on living through paintings, using the Barbie doll as a character silhouette, and, most importantly, overcoming nuanced misconceptions of what beauty should mean or look like.

In the work you create—assessing notions of both beauty and assumed perfection—the detailed collages, lingering sense of automatism, mixed materials in your patina, and even more, your careful distortion in symmetry and compassion established in an enclosed space point to the sense of a contemporary rendition of Afrosurrealism being established. Would you consider this a fair observation?

Yes, I would agree. I think because of the many art movements we were taught in school, I was exposed to pick from many, and I was particularly drawn to anything that surrounded both realism and surrealism. There’s an unexplainable element within it that shifts your mind’s eye, and I also enjoy not telling the viewer the whole story, allowing them to make answers for themselves. I also think combining both real and surreal, mixing fantasies and realities, allowed me to depict what truly goes on in women’s minds in one space without it being so concrete visually.

What do you think embedding that in your processes did for your work?

I mean there are a lot of ideas that I have that I’m not sure how to fully express. I think I go bit by bit with every single painting, but working through a surrealist approach, I don’t have to know every single reason why I put something there, it just happens intuitively. It just makes sense. I also see that as somewhat of an extension of women’s life.

Taking it back to the start—acknowledging that your brother played a crucial role in your development as an artist, what else led you to become an artist?

I went to a print-making institution which is where I learned most of my initial art skills, in the general aspect. Before then, I was at a little artist school studio which is where they teach the younger ones to paint, in hopes of one day becoming a well-known artist—that’s where my recommendation to the print-making school came from. All that served as my foundation, in addition to my brother teaching me how to draw, as he was a self-taught artist. When we started the little artist school studio, I saw he made money selling his work and doing auctions. I figured I’d also try it myself. During that time I was in high school and at the time, my dream was centered around anything fashion, law, or journalism. Though things happened that made my options limited to something in fashion or a completely different route. I ended up going to the artist studio and we’re here now.

I’m also aware, as you’ve spoken about it in the past, of your mother being a beauty therapist, and I’m curious, how do you think that might’ve inspired the work you create?

When she owned the salon back in Congo, I would watch her make wedding dresses, do makeup and nails, and so much more, and I heard some of the conversations. They were always around beauty, life, and how women felt about themselves. It was a lot about how they looked and felt, often compared to others which I felt was something that needed to be changed. For example, sometimes people would say at the end of the day it’s just nails, but for some women, it’s so much more than that; it’s how they express themselves and how they feel confident in their own beauty. My mum’s work also inspired my paintings, not only because of the beauty industry, but she also worked in marketing and similar fields, so there was a lot to do with presentation.

Why is it important for you to pull your juxtapositions of perceived beauty standards and stereotypes into dialogue with one another? 

My friends and I always have these long conversations that always come back to the same “What then?” situation, and I think because of that I overthink a lot, but with my paintings, I’m given an outlet to destress from it and give myself some form of assurance to really calm down a bit. I also want to be able to see how the things that are existent and the things that we worry about interact with one another. Like Instagram culture in comparison to real-life you know? Am I going to feel ugly when I put my picture next to an Instagram model? How am I going to feel? How should I feel? It’s also for the little girl in me to see how the insecurities are playing out and overcoming themselves.

How does using the Barbie doll as your character’s primary silhouette reference speak to your larger point about the misrepresentation of blackness and beauty in both art and the real world?

I think even as adults, there’s still some kid within us, and so for me, the Barbie doll is still being used or referred to as this perfect girl which creates the wrong idea for girls. You don’t have to look like it to be confident in your beauty. In the beginning, when looking at what the Barbie doll stands for, it always came back to conversations about how black women are viewed in comparison and what the symbol of beauty was—how the black women viewed themselves. So, it’s all about changing the notion of needing to look a certain way to be confident in yourself.

Would you say embedding personal photographs into your art also reconstitute how we view the concept of self-portraiture in art?

First, in class, we were always advised to use our own references and avoid plagiarism. And then, we began taking photos of ourselves to inform the look of our artwork. I was also inspired by a lot of cool work on social media, mostly in regard to composition. I also see it as being able to live through my work.

Is there a sense of vulnerability within that, even without you explicitly displaying an image of yourself?

Yes, I think I feel very vulnerable regardless of that. Sometimes I live through those figures, and other times I’m hiding behind them. It’s easier to present yourself as someone else so I think that’s also the purpose my characters serve, whether it’s emotions or thoughts being portrayed.

A select number of your works also feature dull, unsaturated colors, often in monochrome tonality; and while a few delineated your art’s underpins of misconception and challenging single stories, a piece from 2020 titled “In Your Space” conceptually discusses climate change and its disastrous effects. Could you speak a bit about that painting? 

That painting actually wasn’t planned. We had a school project talking about climate change, and at the time, I wasn’t really sure I was going to do it because this kind of topic requires a certain level of research to really express it in painting: causes, who is or isn’t being affected, to what extent is the effect, and much more. Each person was meant to reinterpret it in their own way. I used it in my usual space because it brought the issue closer to the people to who the painting was directed, adding the nasty and rough aesthetic to it. The dull colors were to evoke some sense of deep emotion because you can’t be happy when there’s a lack of vibrant colors. It’s supposed to be somber and humbling. It hits you directly. I wanted the person looking at the painting to feel the filth.

Within your work too, incorporating the collages and image cutouts, you’ve managed to sublimely involve facets of the larger world in your art through mundane objects or little pieces placed into a frame, creating a global narrative within a local environment…

At first, when I started, I would include a lot of these things for aesthetic purposes, like filling a room when you first move into a house. It started changing as I began looking at sentimental objects and pieces outside the space that I’ve interacted in that could also be brought into my work. Like cocktails being added in was representative of conversations women had because it was something present when the girls get together, and you know you also need something strong to talk about certain subjects. So, it’s either in reference to something or something from the outside world I’ve experienced and engaged with beyond just viewing.

One thing you’ve also done amazingly is being able to engage with all your notions and underpins within the singular space, and I’m curious, what informed that decision in using the domestic indoor space as the scenic world of your work?

It goes back to me as a child moving a lot, so we’ve seen the inside of so many homes which come with different structures, different people, and in turn, different values present in each one. Home for me always comes down to stability and calm, so I can be myself in this space but, at the same time, also feel challenged in that same space. I think I’m also searching for stability and calm within my work, as it is something that was sort of lacking when I was younger, even though I was with my family.

What is your hope that the work does in the lives of black women and girls?

Reflection is always important. I think taking time to work on yourself and your surroundings is what I hope is taken from my work, in addition to being content and grateful in a way. I think because there's also so much going on conceptually with my work, I just hope that whoever is viewing it can just enjoy how it makes them feel.

“Sammy! What’s up? I’m going to smoke a bogey first.”

Louis Osmosis calls out to me from a cracked ground-level door of Sharpe-Walentas, the storied DUMBO studio building where he has a seventh-floor laboratory for the next two months, and before I know it, we’re standing against a wall outside, shouting opposing takes on Drake’s latest album over lurching construction vehicles, as curious passersby scurry to and fro in semi-frantic escape from an impending rainstorm. 

It’s a few minutes before 2 PM on a dreary Wednesday afternoon, and Osmosis, an eccentric Brooklyn sculptor-slash-Drizzy-enthusiast, is fresh off of his debut solo exhibition, PLEASE IT IS MAKING IT THANKS :). Hosted by Kapp Kapp, an independent Tribeca gallery run by brothers Sammy and Daniel Kapp, the show doubled as not only Osmosis’ first time being in a showcase entirely under his own name, but also his inaugural taste of a certain tangible latitude, marked by a noticeable brightening of the spotlight. Companion (Hachikō), a jarring cockroach-like sculpture that greeted gallery visitors as soon as they stepped out of the showroom’s elevator, was on the cover of the Brooklyn Rail, and strangers were recognizing him on the street.

He gives the cigarette butt a careless flick towards a line of parked cars on Jay Street, and leads us back inside the studio building’s elevator lobby. “Everything so much so, in regards to the work and the reference material, really comes from a place of irreverence,” he tells me when we get to his workroom. He’s wearing a black T-shirt that reads “I SEE DUMB PEOPLE” in red ink, faded dark-wash jeans, a thin gold chain with a small ying-yang pendant, and a pair of black boots flecked with golden lace-holes. We’re seated a foot or two across from one another in identical rolling chairs, and in the purple-tinted reflection of his larger-than-life square frames, the space’s expansive city-view windows are reduced to four zesty mini-rectangles. “There’s no material that is precious to me,” he continues. “Everything is fair game. And this extends itself to any accolades or accomplishments I may have, too.”

Two years ago, when I first met Osmosis, he was working out of his apartment, then doubling as a studio, on the edge of Brooklyn's Bath Beach neighborhood. His sculpting inventory shared a deep, cluttered garage with his father’s tools, and behind an upstairs door marked OFFICE, hordes of current and past projects seemed to fight tooth-and-nail with each other for breathing room within tight walls that felt like they were fastly closing in. In retrospect, many of the works that survived those humble beginnings wound up eventually seeing the light of day in grand fashion — a faux-bloodied T-shirt pointing a mocking finger towards nipple chafing, for instance, was most recently followed up by Runaway Bride, a wedding dress with two crimson streaks running down its chest, which went on display in a window outside of Theta this past April — but for all the impressive ground that has evidently been gained, Osmosis isn’t necessarily patting himself on the back. He puts art to me as just an “itch” he has to scratch: he’s more intent on not being bored than he is on having fun, and as much as his work may be playful, it’s just as much a dream occupation for its maker as a mode of survival.

As of right now, he’s been scratching the creative itch a bit more fervently in preparation for an upcoming solo show he has at Amanita, a gallery slated to open this fall in what used to be the fabled punk rock hotspot CBGB. Surrounding him in the studio, there’s a pair of staggering, awkward, DIY science project-evocative bathroom sinks stationed on identical keyboard stands, a Zombie T-shirt-wearing mannequin he isn’t entirely sure what to do with yet, whiteboards scrawled with obscure mantras (“2 CIGARETTES + THIS BROKEN HEART OF MINE”; “PURPLE”; “THE MINISTRY OF CRUELTY”), and a convoluted assemblage of hardware tools he assures me I can move out of the way to set down my tape recorder. The mischievous ethos of the room is somewhat visibly deadened by its weather-induced darkness, the same way that the works’ collective irreverent humor is afforded an extra weight by the rigid existential ultimatum that furnishes them. “Me being bored with my work — if that ever happens, just put a gun to my head and end me,” he says, blinklessly halting his fidgeting in the rolling chair. “Old Yeller my ass. Take me out to the back, draw up a fucking sunset, fake or real, I don’t care, and Old Yeller me.”

Born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, Osmosis stumbled upon his now-fabled pen surname over a fateful series of events in middle school. He had loved the sound of “Osmosis” upon being introduced to it for the first time in a biology lesson, and when he came home to see Alton Brown of Good Eats hoisting it up on a whiteboard on television, he immediately changed his name on Facebook. “There’s a reason why I stuck with Louis Osmosis,” he tells me, of his decision to keep the name attached to his artistic identity. “Because it’s like, Oh, what the fuck? What the hell is this? Yo, what is that. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Osmosis attended LaGuardia High School, the famed Upper West Side arts academy-qua-superstar-incubator, thanks to an intentional botch-job of the SHSAT (Specialized High Schools Admissions Test) he executed against his mother’s wishes. He earned a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2018, and though his dream as of right now is to become a professor — the only means of doing so being to either get an MFA, or make it big — he’s intent on the fact that you will never in a million years see him pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree. “[People] get stuck in this rut, from adjunct position to adjunct position, and don’t have time to make the work,” he says, in a rationale he seems to have given thousands of times, about why he wouldn’t pursue teaching via the conventional route. (The spiel also includes the fact that he’d likely go into debt, which would be such a shame, because he would only have ever gone about it for financial stability to begin with.) “I really want to be able to teach on my terms.”

Osmosis often finds himself in situations where there’s an incentive to operate as a teacher of sorts, and although it’s a role he ultimately wants to play, as of late, the structural demands of it are something he’s beginning to grapple with. The current show his work is being featured in is “Lingua Franca,” a Kapp-curated group exhibition he’s described as “art Coachella.” It features a sculpture of his both aptly, and with a familiar tongue-in-cheek flair, titled Various Masses: a paper-mache mass, covered in inkjet prints of photos of crowds (or masses, if you will) pictured from the back, permeated at the top by the sort of long branch-garbage-bag contraption Spongebob would tote en route to skipping town. The object acts as a freestanding testament to its group-borne creative dilemma. “A couple of weeks ago, I really hit this fucking deep drudgery where I really hated the idea of being in crowds,” he says. “I just really hated the idea of gathering with people socially. Crowds just started looking like walls to me. For every crowd I saw, I just saw the backs of their heads.”

A concept he’s long been infatuated with as an antidote to the impasse is anonymity. He light-heartedly reveals to me that he imagines himself to have an alter-ego, named Lucas Mitosis, that helps him to make sense of himself in relation to others. But as much as it’s a gimmick as playful as most of his art, it’s also one that’s just as weighted — he knows that the only way for him to escape constantly having to announce his name is to make it big, and at that point, his name wouldn’t even belong to him anymore. “I wish I could, but I can’t,” he says, asked whether he’d push a button that guaranteed him complete inconspicuity. “The world in which we operate is so predicated on hyper-visibility. The gauge for success is when you walk into a room and people already know who you are. Everyone is their own publicist. Every post, every handshake — literally, just meeting people — you have to be like ‘Hey, what’s up, I’m Louis.’ And it’s fucked, because you ‘get lit,’ and then your name is public property.”

Which is, unfortunately for interviewers with anti-Drizzy predispositions, where Drake comes in. The spectacle of Louis Osmosis finding a way to segue into Drake in conversation lacks little in the brand of Oops, I did it again energy a clever fourth-grader would exude before geeking out about Star Wars conspiracy theories at the dinner table for the fourth time that week. “I’m about to go a mile a minute,” he tells me, barely suppressing a childlike grin, as his eyes light up behind his purple-tinted lenses. For Osmosis, listening to Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind was the most blissful he’d felt — even more so than his debut solo — in ages, because it doubled down on all the existential baggage he had been carrying, creative and personal alike, and threw it all back at him like a “weighted blanket, but one that was weighted with leeching lead.” Much of this baggage was rooted in these visibility-slash-invisibility interplays. “There’s a really long lineage of the club proper, as a site where one can take on a more libidinal position,” he explains, delving into the house music discourse Drake’s LP unsuspectingly ignited. “When you think of a club, everyone is facing the same way. If you’re on the dance floor, you’re only going to see the backs of heads, in a dark room — so it’s doubly anonymous. And everyone’s facing the same orientation. It’s giving zombies. And it’s this sweet fucking relief… it almost feels like fucking dying, man.”

He swivels a bit in his rolling chair, and scans the studio space. “Basically, with this next body of work, I kind of want to do what that album did.”

In a literal sense, he’s getting close. PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS :) featured a whale vertebra manipulated into a booming subwoofer, blasting a persistently-droning recording of ambient-yet-challenging soundscapes easily fittable on a polarizing Kanye West release from five years in the future. But beyond strictly-sonic means, there’s also a certain catharsis — one Honestly, Nevermind made him experience in writhing torrents — that is, ever-so-increasingly, permeating his artistic approach just as much as the irreverence does. Early on in our conversation, one hand fiddling with a vape and the other theatrically gesticulating, he reveals to me with a breezy “you can put this in the interview” that his parents are divorcing. Growing up, though their relationship was strained, his mom and dad made it a point to remain together for the sake of raising their son in a “proper home.” In a light-hearted way typical of Osmosis, he jokes that most of the people he knew through adolescence came from a broken household of some sort, thus making this development the final “infinity stone” in making him fit in once and for all. Yet, also typical of Osmosis, behind the light-heartedness, there’s also the looming air of an existential burden. “The thing is, this is where the turmoil comes in, because now I’m a grown-ass motherfucker,” he says. “I’m involved in the divorce. This is, like, a three-party event. So that, I think, in a way has informed the space in which I’m making work right now. Insofar as before, I was — and still am — dealing with this really affected recoil. And now, not that it’s settled, but more so the doldrums have gotten even deeper.”

It’s one of several fragments of a reckoning Osmosis is actively doing with the demands of growing up, and at the same time that he does so, his work, too, is balancing the irreverent playfulness of youth with the burdened heft of incurred wisdom. PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS :) was accompanied by an art book of the same title, wherein Osmosis hop-scotched masterfully between tongue-in-cheek imagery and purgative storytelling. One of the book’s more serious moments is marked by a firsthand narrative of his grandmother’s funeral. Handwritten, and featuring a scratched-out word every now and then, the story progresses numbly from encounters with Alzheimer’s disease, to grave misspellings, to mid-service family fights. “To substitute a shadow for a misnomer,” he concludes in its final lines, “is to be refunded our blunders, the specific blunders that remind me how happy accidents make me.”

As much as accidents make him happy, his studio practice, especially when vamped-up in preparation for a show, is markedly stringent. Last time I was here, it was mid-March, and as tourists and traffic droned from outside the window, he was frantically prepping for the aforementioned debut solo, slated at that point to open in a matter of weeks. Three months later, most of what gave the studio its chaotic energy then remains the same — two large whiteboards double as to-do lists and ink-scrawled manifestoes; provocative unfinished free-standing objects are dispersed like a wild-minded fourth-grader’s made-up avatars on the Mii Channel; tools are ubiquitous, hanging on walls, populating tables, sprawled out across the floor. The only difference, now, is that its mastermind is on to the next challenge: now that he’s gotten over the hump of his first solo exhibition, he has to make sense of what awaits him on the other end of newfound stature. And, in a way that’s simultaneously as inviting as child’s play, and threatening as life-or-death, the only way to prepare for whatever’s next is to do so in practice. “Everything is fair game,” he says, “so long as you know how to play the game.” When he tells me this, he’s talking about his nothing-is-sacred modus operandi, but at this stage of his career, it’s just as applicable to the winding road ahead.

One of Osmosis’ most sarcastic recent pieces is, perhaps, Shtick Figure (2022), a lofty assemblage of beaver-chewed wood pieced together into a Groot-looking humanoid by threaded rod, steel, epoxy, contact cement, and rubber. Midway through my first time meeting him, at his apartment, in 2020, he rose from the table we were seated at near his kitchen, and led me into the “OFFICE” room to show me the material. “I have a chewed piece of branch in the studio, that a beaver had chewed,” he said, moments before rising from his seat. “I’ve been sitting on it for a long time; I spent a year not knowing what to do with it. I’ll show you right now.” The demonstration came in response to a question I had asked about his relationship with nature as a muse — he had also, at that point, been actively waiting for a pigeon to excrete upon an in-progress sculpture sitting in his backyard before he could call it finished — and all in all, his response was that although nature wasn’t necessarily interesting to him, there just so happened to be interesting things within it. (Another one of the more jarring pieces in the “OFFICE” studio was a [humanely-sourced] tortoise shell, studded with remote-control car antennas that protruded from each of its scutes.)

In a grander sense, Osmosis’ approach to nature is in some way analogous to his ebbs and flows with life writ large. His entire characteral makeup, not just in art, is informed by a certain disillusioned aloofness, a removal from the equation that manifests itself in levels of flippancy so acute that they’re morbidly, viscerally, hilarious. “I’ve already accepted this zombification within me,” he says, “and I’m compelled by it. Which is on some art school subversion shit, maybe, but I don’t care. It’s like post-apathy; it’s like post-nihilism. Zombification is what animates me.” In conversation, and from a consumer’s standpoint, life seems to register for Osmosis as a joke that’s in the awkward stage where no one in the audience knows whether it’s okay to keep laughing or not, and for a few moments, there's a smattering of tentative, hesitant applause ringing from every other seat. Heavyweight cultural mainstays in similarly awkward post-limelight positions, like corporate co-optings of social justice campaigns, are frequent targets for him — another follow-up on his nipple-chafing tee series reads “THE FUTURE IS EMALE”; his PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS :) art book features a short story in which the word “white” is cheekily censored in a way that makes it easily interchangeable with “whale.”

“It writhed and with each contortion let out an agonizing bellow,” the story reads. “The w***e’s speech was incoherent as if verbalizing an associative scrawl: ‘Al Gore… Gorky gore porn… I’m a ‘goraphobe!...’ ‘S-solar p-panel on the wall… w-who’s the d-doldrums of ‘em all?’”

The last time I saw Osmosis in person, he was sunken into a couch in the back area of Kapp Kapp, making small-talk with the gallery’s owners while people filtered in and out of the space to meet him and purchase his book. The books, spiral-bound and wrapped in plastic, were stationed in a fastly-shrinking stack on a nearby table, and as I flipped through the gallery’s sample copy, he joked with a painter who had come to the show with interest in buying one of his “Money Heart” pieces, which are comprised of bunched-up two dollar bills melded together to form heart shapes.

The “Money Heart” pieces are, if anything, perhaps the most trademarkable works in Osmosis’ oeuvre. He tells me that the mark of an artist that has given up is a regurgitation of their most successful formula. “It reminds me of Jordan brand re-retroing all of the old colorways,” he explains. “Because they don’t got shit. And they know that shit will fucking push.”

Whether he'll ever commercialize a work of his in similar fashion isn’t an answer we can have right now, because his take on quitting is just as nuanced as his philosophy at-large. “Sure it might be the artist’s fault to some degree," he says. "But I really get it. Giving up is kind of sick.”

“This is the most vibe-forward thing he’s ever done. And I think the impetus to do such a vibe-laden thing, with that being how it encounters the listener, points to the vacuousness of the landscape that we find ourselves in. Like, let’s meet the vacuum with another vacuum. Anything else you put into a vacuum, it’ll probably fucking die, because there’s no oxygen. A vacuum won’t. You know? This is vacuous music, and that’s a beautiful thing. Because it offers me — and maybe I’m getting a bit overly poetic here — but it offers me, the listener, the viewer, a moment in which I can kind of experience the vacuum without the threat of a material death. I can really come to terms with my own extremities in the two most visceral ways of being a human: which are dancing, and crying. There is nothing like music that you can dance to, and the lyrics are not only trying to be sad, but they’re so hollow in their depth that that makes it even sadder, too. It still hits, even though I know this was crafted to hit.” — Louis Osmosis on Honestly, Nevermind

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