Published in obscure object 1.75/76 (2025), Informal Noticings Press

An Interview with Selby Sohn

Anne Lesley Selcer

A: I'm thrilled to be talking to you about Your Mood Projects. Aside from having the best name ever, I've always felt like your gallery has a real “go” energy. It seems socially welcoming, and that there's not really a limit on what someone could propose—open. I've noticed this aspect in your art practice as well. When interacting with Lygia Clark’s sculptural objects recently in a museum at her retrospective, I thought wow, this nails what art essentially is—the desire to play. I think Your Mood Projects really nails the art opening, i.e. the desire to hang out. I wonder if you wanted to say anything about the social aspect of your practice?

S: That is an interesting tie in between my own work and my curatorial work—the social aspect. I call it Your Mood because I think about people's attitudes about art when they come in and look at art, and how their attitudes predetermine how they receive an art piece. But there is another extension that you found, which is that looking at art is often a socially anxious thing, and I wanted everyone who came to Your Mood to feel welcome, and that they could be themselves. Part of my curatorial work was finding people who are alone in the space, and introducing them to other people in the room, with long introductions, so that they could get to know each other. 

Yeah, so there were no limits on what people could propose. I did have to say no a few times because of safety concerns—Jasmine, wanting to climb the building, for example, twice. And once to something an artist wanted to write on the wall, which I could see being interpreted as offensive in a way that wasn't good or even that interesting. But generally, I am more interested in what artists are doing and their visions than what my own vision is of their work, and I'm not at all interested in imposing my vision onto other artists.

A: Something happened on the beach in Bodega Bay during Judith Navratil's Art Camp IRL, where you and Crystal created Porous Fields. Suddenly, we were playing together in multicolored, cut-out felt fields that had, well, pores for all of us to put ourselves into—our hands, our heads, and so forth. We moved together inside the sculpture amid the beautiful golden hour on the beach. This concretized something I have been thinking about relentlessly, which is this necessary shift in social formation away from the neoliberal individual—the ideology we've been pushed into since the 1980’s locked in  by personal digital technology—into an imaginative possibility for something else. It was colorful, bright, infused with sun, joyous. You and I quickly decided to see if we could feel each other's energy without touching hands while we were connected by one of these felt pieces. 

I saw pictures of Cone Heads, your newest piece. I'm curious how some of the same themes work in that piece. I'm curious how the cones were used, what you were thinking while building this piece. I'm curious about what the social aspect for the cones was, recreating this cute humiliation that a dog needs to go through when its neutered. How did that function in real time? How did it function socially? I'm curious about the site where you first performed this, a barn at a newer art festival called Divebarn which started in 2024. That's leading to a curiosity about, for lack of a better word, DIY art spaces—art spaces created by people without tremendous, institutional money or without the direct hopes to feed into the art market. I'm wondering if you could give us your thoughts on this right now in San Francisco. Your Mood Projects played a tremendous role in that ecology, a really successful role in that ecology. I'd also like your bigger thoughts about the politics and sociality of the art market, where it's going, where it's not going. I'm also interested in your personal thoughts: what you had expected to encounter as a young artist versus what, you have encountered? Can you place your curatorial project into the unexpected sociopolitical turn our culture has taken? And maybe also, into your visionary sense? What do you want, in this situation? 

S: I was looking at Porous Fields yesterday because I'm applying to this thing and I revisited in my mind the pure magic of sociality in that moment, and also the surprise aspect of just never knowing how someone will relate to my pieces. I didn't think that everyone in the group would join together and walk together like a gigantic organism. I also didn't think that we would do that crazy thing where our hands were only almost touching, but I could feel them touching. It is, in large part, a resistance to normative, social interactions. I remember when I was a kid, being perplexed by the fact that adults would stand around and talk to each other as their only way of relating to each other, because I found that so boring. And I do think that language in these techno feudalist online platforms curates our sociability in a way that is so damaging, where it feels like we are voting on each other, constantly measuring each other up. I had a weekend, recently, of talking to people at a party and feeling afterwards that I had failed a conversation. And I don't think I'm alone in having that feeling. Much of my art practice has to do with creating these sculptural objects that shift our sociability as a way of also shifting normalcy. I want to change the way that we relate to each other, and also to allow room for all these different aspects of ourselves and our personalities that are not getting expressed. I think that this narrow range of conversations that we all keep having can feel really confining. 

Cone Heads in the barn was incredible. I wish you were there. I love the barn and its sensibility is very similar to what Judit is doing. I was surrounded by this incredible outdoor space at the barn: an apple orchard, hillsides, and this creek with these unbelievable, smooth rocks. There was this moment when Mary Graham was singing next to the creek when I could feel the sound of her voice in the rocks. There is something about having this outdoor, gorgeous setting, which feels unique to northern California. It makes me happy to be here, to be an artist here, and it feels very different than having an art show in a white-walled space. The cones were amazing. The thing I wasn't expecting with the cones was that people would put them on and put their heads together creating their own room — and you could whisper things to people. I was also not expecting how much they would change the sound in the space. Niyant and I wore them around and got used to them and then when we took them off, it felt like the entire room and all of its sounds flooded our senses once again. You know when you dunk a container into water then all this water pours into it on the sides? It felt like that. I do want to do it again as a scripted piece so everyone could have that tear off moment with the cones and have that same feeling. I think a lot of times art gets encoded in a really particular way because we need images to communicate on the internet, but the physical sensation of wearing the cones was profound. I want to push everyone to get out to the barn next year because it was fun. I bonded with many people and yeah, we need more spaces like that. There isn't really a commercial market for experimental work in the Bay Area. These commercial galleries tend to show drawings and paintings and photographs, so to do anything sound based or experimental is hard, it really isn't that lucrative... It's important to have art whether or not it is commercially successful, because that doesn't mean that the work doesn't deserve to exist. Often that work can just take us out of these dominant power structures and normative zones of relatability that I feel stuck in.

A: When you describe the impetus for your practice stemming from when you were a little kid running and playing amidst adults that were talking, I feel the childlike sense of physicality. I feel the body. I feel this child’s mind is noticing that the body is completely absent in adult interaction, which felt (and feels) so strange. And I think about this beautiful tradition that you describe in Northern California of creating art situations in our natural environment. They feel to me like special treasure that we get to keep finding, keep digging up, keep creating. I think about how some of your work could be placed in a more conceptual environment, perhaps as a single instead of a multiple, with a focus on its ideas and its thinking. I think about the art scene where I started being an art writer in Vancouver, BC, which is very resourced and very focused on discourse and moving artists through their gallery system and out internationally without the emphasis on the flat art, wall art that we have here, mostly for saleability, and focused instead on being part of this larger art discourse. That's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about Your Mood Projects. I know anytime someone is working around social, sociality, or favoring the relational aspects of anything, it tends to be devalued. I wanted to frame your project as a really important kind of temporary dissolving machinery of creative life here in the Bay. I'm thinking of these themes of the body, of relationality, and the play impulse that you describe, and I want to ask you what you want? I want to leave that question really open. I think that as artists, we live in a dissolved space. Art is a category that somebody created to describe this thing that we do, and then to support and foster us to keep doing it. And that's all good. But I know that as an interdisciplinary writer creating art, I live in a multidimensional space with ideas, sensory experiences, emotions, relational valences, visions. So I just want to leave it as what do you want?

S: That day in particular when I realized this thing about adults talking, we were playing outside in our neighbors yard making “blueberry sandwiches”—taking a giant bouncy ball, one of those exercise balls, and squishing it between our bodies, which was fun, the sensation of being squished. And then I remember the conversation that my mom was having sounded anxious. I think that is a great way of putting it, is that often our bodies are forgotten in social interactions. My work is a way of also implementing them and opening them up to more possibilities. That is interesting what you're saying about Vancouver having that kind of framework around that discourse. I also felt like there was a lot of that framework in Los Angeles. I have found that framework here, but it is not often the artwork that is being celebrated and shown and lauded in institutions. I have found that the more interesting things that are happening here are happening lower to the ground. Also, in some of the institutions that I do really like. What I want is connection. To feel connected to my art, to myself, to my community, to sensation, to my body, to other people's bodies, and also language. Not language in the way that it pre-determines, but language in the way that it opens up. I think of play as a way of getting around the ordinary and the expected, as a way of detouring. Your Mood was a way of allowing things outside the framework to exist, to show themselves, to bring artwork and visions that are not my own, but that I find exciting. So it's about making something visible that wasn't being seen.