Programs

Interview With Connor Totten

What’s your earliest art memory?

Probably being with my grandmother. She exposed me to art at a very young age and taught me how to sew when I was around seven. Afterwards, I started taking art classes at Joann’s and at school, which got me into doing technical theater in school. And that started to bring me to the museum to look at paintings and absorb whatever I can. 

I notice your work is made exclusively with repurposed manufactured materials (sex dolls, televisions, rhinestones, etc.). Can you talk a little bit about how your choice of materials relates to your conceptual aims? 

I find it interesting to work with materials and objects that have a preconceived history, and I like playing off of their given context, and that tells me where to go with what I want from the object. Conceptually, for example, all the sex dolls I just got from Amazon. I found that to be an important thing because I found that it talks about easy access to bodies, and easy access to intimacy and gay culture. It just provides more of a context than I would find working with a pure material. Although, you know, things are needed when they’re needed, but for the works in this show specifically, I was thinking about access to bodies. 

Some big themes in this show are sexual indulgence and perversion, and it comes at a time when young people are having less sex than ever. How do you make sense of that? 

Yeah, I think we’re all noticing that. And I think it’s brought to our attention in weird ways culturally…Since the sexual revolution, the culture around sex is kind of slowing down to where it was before. 

Becoming more conservative?

Yeah, and that leads into other topics, but as conservatism grows more rampant it’s only made me more restless. You can go on the internet and look at anything at any moment and any time, and I find that so interesting in terms of our comfortability with each other’s bodies and our comfortability with nudity. Also, I’m thinking about COVID too, after that we were scared of being near each other. There’s also been a rise in talk around protection like PrEP and other queer oriented medications which are started to be offered more recreationally. And I find that to be interesting too, because as that starts to become more mainstream, people’s ignorance starts growing as well. 

Do you have any daily rituals? 

I’m really bad at routines, quite frankly. If I’m able to be at the studio for more than like two or three hours I try to spend 30 or 40 minutes just reading and researching at my desk, because if I don’t prioritize that then I would never get anywhere… I don’t know. I try not to stick to anything, because even before I started the semester I was like “Oh, what if I did a drawing a day, what if I did a painting a day?…” And I tried that and it was just like… I don’t want to do this. [laughs]

Can you talk about the literary influences in your work? 

When I was coming up with the concept of the show, I was reading a lot of Dennis Cooper’s work. I read Closer, Frisk, The Sluts… I’d never read such true and vulgar writing before. And as extreme as everything that he writes about is, I just know it’s true, which I found to be really inspiring. That was kind of the jumpstart for the whole show, trying to capture that realness. In terms of other things, I grab references from all over. Like, I had this book of gun diagrams that I checked out from the library, and you would flip through and it would show you every single gun model ever and all the materials that you would need to construct it. I got into pricing out everything and seeing how much it would cost to build a firearm myself instead of buying one. Even though guns have little to do with what I’m trying to do, the specific function of each small part ended up being a good conceptual backbone.

If the Art Institute was on fire and you could only save one artwork, which one would it be and why?

As the museum’s burning down, I think the first thing I’d try to grab is probably that John Currin painting of the girls on the couch sipping martinis and smoking [Stamford After Brunch]. That grabs my attention every time I go in the contemporary wing. Oh! No, I would go in there and take Huck and Jim, the Charles Ray sculpture of two big steel men from Huckleberry Finn. Just because I watched a video about him when I was really young and then I remember going to the museum and being like oh my god they have it here.

Interview conducted and edited by Eugenio Salazar Castro

Exhibition Material