Kitchen Talk 14
adawickensney.net
“Wickens’s work investigates themes of loneliness, adolescent obsession, queer naiveté, dependance, digital folklore and image dissemination.”
Introduce yourself, list three things we need to know about you or your practice.
My name is Ada, I’m an artist and writer and I live in Queens. I like to make work about compulsions and obsession, and most of the time they are paintings.
What’s your creative process?
I spend a lot of time online browsing old forums, videos, etc. and always have a large collection of found images and screenshots at hand. A lot of my practice starts with scrolling through what I have collected and trying to separate what I find special, funny, meaningful, etc. from what really isn’t.
What factors have influenced your creation?
Growing up on the internet, and especially growing up trans on the internet, meant that I was constantly engaged in “research”, trying to seek out answers and simultaneously attempting to find / build an ideology, voice, taste, etc, as all adolescents do, through absorbing oddball diatribes, pornography, propaganda, and a lot of this took place on older forms of social media like blogs and forums. A lot of my archive is stuff from highschool. I think all of this had as big of an impact on me as the actual art I was seeing.
How does your medium govern your artistic practice?
I usually say I’m a painter and most of my work takes that form. The work in this show is all found images printed on custom printed rugs. I think that maybe more than “image making” a lot of my practice revolves around curation and image presentation.
How do you see the relationship between life and work?
It’s a constant push and pull. Sometimes constraints form the work as much as narrative or style or a broader thematic intention or investigation. This isn’t always a bad thing, I think some of the work I’m most proud of has come out of a struggle with constraints like time, money, my own craftsmanship, a desire to not produce work that “shows off” or is technique forward or whatever, the idea of “taking the easy way out” and repeating a stupid “why would you do it that way” gesture over and over again until it sort of turns into something else.
Why and how do you involve yourself into your work, or specifically, when you’re including figures into your subject matter, are you centering on humanity or are you seeing it as a mean to expree?
I rarely make work that isn’t in some way related to or “about” my experience, I think it’s dishonest to say that it isn’t, and I’m not at all interested in work where the focus is on form or context or acts as essentially an attempt at a clever physicalized philosophical proof. That being said, I don't think the relation of the work to its context or history is something that can be ignored. The rugs are a product of mass market global capitalism, and so is my entire life, identity, the drugs I take to change my body, etc.
What’s been on your mind lately?
The relationship between love and sex, the relationship between eating and thinking
How’s life outside of studio?
Usually more productive,
Share one favorite item of yours.
My collection of Troll Dolls
Plans for the future?
Bigger and better!
And finally, how do you like your eggs?
Sunny side up.
Ada Wickens (b. 2000, Dunedin, New Zealand) is an artist and writer basedwhose work investigates themes of loneliness, adolescent obsession, queer naiveté, dependance, digital folklore and image dissemination. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. Recent group exhibitions include ‘CYOA’ at Mast Books (New York, NY) ‘World Pulse Beats Beyond My Door’ with Pop Gun (Brooklyn, NY) and ‘CHAOS BROTHERS’ with Drama Gallery (New York, NY). She lives and works in Queens, New York.