I don’t know if it’s important, but Karsten and I meet at a bar in Williamsburg that is right by the BQE at 5ish and it’s nice and warm for October and we sit outside and have drinks. I stupidly have a list of questions to which I refer a bunch that seemed to me to ruin the flow of the conversation at times…now I know.

Matthew: OK. Let’s See. I’m just going to start at the top. What do you think the relationship is between place visited and work created for you?

Karsten: Place visited, work created. Well,

M: The second part of this question is whether you wanted to talk about Peru or anything like that. If you wanted to talk about any kind of those things. It’s an open-ended question.

K: I think the reason I recently decided to make video is because I was sort of dissatisfied with my studio practice as an outlet for experience.

M: Right.

K: The things that were really important to me, were all happening to me outside of the studio – like traveling to unusual places, meeting unusual people, seeing new things. None of this happens when I am alone making sculptures. I don’t believe I have a romantic process in that way – I don’t have that type of immediate experience with the things I make, as I do outside in the world. The thing about video that interests me, and the way I’m trying to use it, is that it gets me out of the studio and to have interactions with people and things, and at the same time I can make something.

M: Do you think that you would ever be interested in making a documentary?

K: Potentially.

M: But your relationship… I’m just trying to figure out… your relationship to your travel is not a one-to-one ratio. It’s not like you go, you see, you come back, you create it.

K: It’s not about reporting.

M: Yeah, it’s not about reporting. Cool. Interesting. And do you want to discuss your trip to Peru? I didn’t want to boil it down… Because as a friend I feel like you came back from your trip to Peru, kind of determined, for lack of better words, to turn it around. You seemed to be a more righted person. Like you seemed to have more focus or something.

K: The work I have been making for the two years since then has been a direct attempt to reconcile what happened in the jungle.

M: So for people who don’t know… You went to the jungle and…

K: I participated in ayahuasca ceremony. Which is a thousands of year old, magical, hallucinogenic plant medicine administered by healers named curanderos, or in my case curandera (mine was woman), in the rain forest of the Upper Amazon.

M: It sounds funny, but… My question is, do you find it frustrating that you don’t get up one day and have the ability to make things move with your mind or receive messages from beyond. Because I know I do. Or do you? – Can you move things with your mind? When you explained coming back and trying to recreate your “vision quest”, for lack of better words, it makes me think of my frustration with the way things are – waking up every morning and trying to kind of create an experience, similar to you, but do you find that frustrating? What’s your response to that?

K: My frustration of that nature was what sent me to Peru in the first place. And that lack was fulfilled in a way I couldn’t have imagined. What the frustration is now, is what to do with all of that information. Not that it’s an ability to move things with my mind, but it was unworldly. It was beyond the limitations that my reality had presented me up to that point. The problem now is how to assimilate that experience and how to let it function in my day-to-day.

M: For me, I find after making things and training, going to school, and thinking a lot about what it means to create works, and what they are about and stuff, I find for me personally it’s kind of repulsive, the idea of authoring it. Not repulsive… I feel like the authorship of like “I thought it, I’m going to make it…” is off-putting. That’s why I’m saying that I want to wake up and get the message from somewhere else. I feel like that’s the thing that attracts me so much to shamanistic stuff, and stuff like that - even though it has a responsibility to right things for the community or do things, I feel like the feeling to me is getting a message from something that is not you, that’s collective unconscious, or like, it’s like an energy, that kind of thing is generous and enlightening. So, I feel like trying to extend that to an art-making process can be frustrating, you know? I feel like art is so authored. And so maybe in its root it’s shamanistic and it has a message from beyond, but I feel like sometimes it can be frustrating to capture that.

K: Yeah, a lot of what I was doing in the studio in the past was being clever, or trying to one up, whomever, whatever else.

M: Me too.

K: One thing about ayahuasca experience is that it’s out of your hands. The information that is given to you doesn’t feel like it’s coming from inside you or even the person administering it to you, it feels like it truly is coming from somewhere else – and where that somewhere else is, is a whole issue. So, I’ve been trying to use that type of framework in the work, trying to grab out of what’s been mysteriously delivered to me, rather than what I am coming up with myself. So the frustration isn’t so much how to get the information, but how to use it.