(Almost) 10 Questions for Kate Durbin
- By Edward Clifford
What did you want to be when you were young?
A writer and artist.
What inspired you to create these pieces?
Unfriend Me Now is a single-piece video installation, but there are lots of individual clowns in it. MR 's Summer 2019 issue includes stills from that piece. It’s about the fighting on Facebook around the election of Trump, specifically about people declaring that others unfriend them. I was thinking about the algorithm’s role in increasing polarization and how Facebook profited from stealing our attention and infecting our language. I was also considering how this potentially contributed to the rise of Trump and the proto-fascist moment we find ourselves in.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your art?
For Unfriend Me Now, I imagined what it would be like to be physically imprisoned eternally in Facebook as a kind of hell. In my work I often re-imagine digital spaces as more fully or explicitly physical as I think a lot about how the digital and analogue are both real spaces that infect one another and create a new reality we increasingly cannot escape.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the artistic process?
No, I think that would be too distracting for me.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to create?
My number one ritual is really making the work itself. I set timers and make myself do it most days.
Who typically gets the first look at your work?
My partner, artist Rollin Leonard. He is brilliant and gives me valuable feedback.
If you could work in another form what would it be?
I am a writer as well as a new media artist and filmmaker. I like to say my medium is popular culture, just as a painter’s medium is paint. The subject matter for me reveals the form a specific piece will take. For example, I am brainstorming a piece about Jeff Bezos right now, and don’t yet know what form he will take.
What are you working on currently?
I am working on a short film about the Brett Kavanaugh hearing and the language of rape culture. For that I worked with actors, which was very energizing even though the material is difficult.
KATE DURBIN is a Los Angeles–based artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work deals with popular culture and digital media. She has shown her work internationally, and her most recent book is E! Entertainment. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum, and elsewhere. You can find out more at katedurbin.la.
