Lauri Firstenberg: In preparation for your second solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, slated to open September, where did you begin?

Seth Kelly: The title of the show is "pseudomorphosis". The beginnings of this body of work came from a group of books of 19th French literature that explores the Orient or Near East, in particular Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony.

LF: How does the work engage with the historical legacy of Orientalism in art and literature?

SK: The three points of origin that could be generalized as "Orientalism" that most intrigued me are the publication of the "Description de L'Egypte", (the vast documentation undertaken during Napoleon campaign in Egypt), the invention of carbon dating, and the growing knowledge of Gnosticism. These three elements all had a destabilizing effect on biblical history, and this is the aspect of "St. Antony" that particularly interested me. The opening up of a void in the depth of history is something that I find articulated in sculptural work from the 1960's through the 70's. By locating its function in contemporary pop culture, particularly in film. As a referent to the alien or exotic, it maps a rather complicated trajectory of modernist growth from French and English attempts at "Empire" to the events of the day.

LF: Your drawing, sculpture and installation practice can be characterized as a production based on the logic of appropriation - from the popular to the historical. This strategy is made manifest in the transformation of the Classical controposto Greco female (A Statue to Generality, 2001) or mutation of marginal network Sci-Fi characters cum quasi-religious relics (Burial Army and the Martian Ruin). How do you position your work as other than a fusion of traditional and contemporary visual terms?

SK: I've never thought of my work as a formal play of visual terms. The referents are not apolitical or empty by their own merits. To look at the matter simply as a fusion denies the opportunity to construct metaphor. I guess I think of the process more akin to dialectical synthesis than an act of pastiche.

With the Martian Ruin(large head statue/ruin of St.John the Batist in psudo-martian soil) the associative points I'm interested in are the Mandeans, an only surviving Gnostic cult who placed St.John in the role of the true savior instead of Jesus, and myths of life originating on Mars. The attempt is to position the work in such a way that the viewer understands that the relationship of these points are not an exercise in the baroque, rather that they can be assembled as information. Burial Army is comprised of 14" tall figurines standing in rows, much like the Egyptian burial armies. They are painted to look like a dark bronze patina and are place below and to the side of Sophia Descending. Each one is individual and is taken from a character in a movie. Whether from horror, sci-fi or plain drama,the characters chosen are representations of near eastern or desert peoples. The associations to movies is an attempt to trigger associations of the "Orient" as an alien culture. This is something that developed in English and French literature during their attempts at empire during the 19th century. Sci-fi has often used the orient/alien metaphor, most notably in the Dune series. The fantasy of the planet Mars speculates heavily in this metaphor, as a desert planet, perhaps with an ancient culture of its own.

LF: What are some other key players in your narrative?

SK: Martian Ruin is made in a pseudo-Martian soil and is roughly 16" squared. It is made to look like a millennium-old statue of a human male head, based on images of the head of St. John the Baptist. It is placed on a pedestal under the gaze of the bird statue. The head of John the Baptist is a referent to the Mandeans, they are the only Gnostic sect which still exist today in Iran. The Mandeans placed John the Baptist in the role of Christ. The Gnostics existed during and lived near the formations of Christianity and Islam. They believed that a radical dualism existing between God and the world, that this world was the creation of a lowly demi-urge, who hopes to keep us trapped on this planet asleep to the true knowledge of the universe. "The soul slumbers in matter."

Sophia Descending is a scale model of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It is mounted on the ceiling and on its surface is painted the constellation Orion. To the Gnostics the entity Sophia represented divine wisdom. The fall of wisdom is one of the great metaphors in gnosticism of the fall from light into the darkness of this world. The Hagia Sophia is a symbol of the eastern reach during the Hellenistic era of Christianity. The Hellenistic period the great meeting of the east and west existed for a thousand years until its conquest by Islam.

The Ascetic is a large wall drawing representing an ascetic's cave. St. Antony was the first great ascetic; rejecting the corruption of the material world, he lived on the most minimal substances in a cave in Upper Egypt. The Gnostics were often split over how to act over the falsity of the material world. Like the ascetic, some would feel obligated to avoid further contamination by the world and therefore would try to reduce contact with it to a minimum. Operating from the same foundation but with the opposite outcome is the libertine. The libertine looks at the material world as a place of no consequence, giving them absolute freedom to defile.

The Libertine is a wall-mounted polygon that is extrapolated from the internal angles of a pentagon which fold outward. The resulting object looks something like an aperture or portal. As a referent of Bladen, Smith, or Smithson, the libertine's character traits goes along a parallel coarse with minimalistic nihilism.

LF: Your practice tends to negotiate iconography of the American adolescent male as well as the history of art, particularly mining the trajectories of Western and non-Western figurative sculpture. There is much work done today by your contemporaries that can be characterized as driven by a nostalgic impulse for a non-so-distant cultural past and youth. This is evidenced in Shamim Momim's forthcoming exhibition "Will Boys Be Boys." Your work however, should not be essentialized in terms of nostalgia as a critical strategy. The work's violence is not simply an animation of adolescent angst as manifested in the visual lexicon of Death Metal T-shirt wearing teens but rather gestures to its affinity for a kind of classical deconstructivism, akin to Rodin. How, in your view, do these tensions manifest in your work?

SK: I think I approach the adolescent male as an ad executive would, as the dominant consumer/producer of pop-culture. I rarely think of nostalgia. Things that might look like nostalgia in my work are interests in eschatology and science fiction. Sci-fi is best understood as the re-interpretation of the recent past into the near future. I have no nostalgia for the early 19th century; actually it's rather scary. It's just in reading and studying western literature and art, it is hard not to locate like ideas applicable today. The elements of my work that are violent I hope are looked at as investigations in negation. Negation exists in death metal and deconstructivism, but it always feels incomplete to me. The depths of negation that Nauman investigated are the real challenge.

LF: Could you further your discussion of co-existing temporalities in your work - you discuss interest in the near future, yet historicity reverberates throughout your practice.

SK: Shifting the temporal references is an attempt to place the viewer in a more groundless state. The shifts in scale of the work in relation to what they represent is used in a similar way. Locating contemporary problems in a fictive time hopefully creates an effect like reversed hindsight.

LF: Would you speak to the elements of theatricality in your work?

SK: What I'm most interested in is the theatricality of the everyday, passivity in viewer ship of movies and T.V., transposed as a system for understanding history. I approach this in a Debordian way, as a malevolent falsity.

LF: Can you elaborate on your relationship to Debord's conceptions of the spectacular-yours bears an inconspicuous affinity to these ideas - cultural imperialism, mediation...

SK: The Debordian concept of the passivity of the viewer in the midst of the spectacle is something I am always conscious of while working. The question for me is where one believes they are operating in relation to the mediation, how clearly can one locate themselves and from what foundations do we construct are vantage points. John Miller's work has always made me think of these problems. His sculpture from the early to mid nineties are some of my favorite things made over the last 25 years.

Seth Kelly's exhibition entitled Pseudomorphosis is open September 9 through October 11 at Derek Eller Gallery in New York City.

Lauri Firstenberg is Adjunct Curator at Artists Space, New York. She is an independent curator and critic based in Los Angeles and frequent contributor to Lab 71.

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