Sylvie Hayes-Wallace makes work by way of accumulation: out of the “ephemera” of living, out of emotional pain, selves and their abstraction, ways of coping, and cultural controls therein. The material inscription of systems of thought into every psyche and surface is central to the artist’s interior self-portraits in lumpy cement, wire fencing, and industrial glass decorated with fangirlesque collages and to-do lists on outbursts of blue and magenta notes. There are clinical studies that show if you have a bright pink room, you’re more likely to go insane, her big sister once advised. This conversation was edited to mirror the artist’s experience and processing of selfhood in her practice. When AI transcribed this, it was 28,682 words. It required a sub-document coincidentally named “Sylvie organization” (an unconsciously quintessentially Sylvie title) with “essential” moments, which would be called a “listicle.” It’s even color-coded (I don’t do this). We talked about things that would be off the record and decided to keep them on. We talked about things that are still off. Sharing everything and nothing, Hayes-Wallace considers the ways our inner worlds are pressured to cohere within an unstable external one, to be organized and “ordered” in service of comfortability. It’s possible that we’re all unreliable narrators, her practice seems to suggest, by no choice of our own, susceptible to larger social forces and psychological phenomena. While terrifying, perhaps knowingly occupying a position of complicity in the absurd “upkeep” of smoothing our fissures, or accepting that the self is never solid, is the only option for retaining agency and honesty about anything right now.
Margaret Kross: I clocked via email that it was two years and one day ago that I came to your studio in Ridgewood. It was another heat wave, drenched in sweat, navigating out of a COVID surge. We talked a lot about psychological cesspools.
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace: It’s crazy to think how everything can be entirely different but the same.
MK It feels in line with your work and ways of measuring time and ourselves. I also remember there was a grid of windows sort of shrouded in milky plastics, not unlike your wire sculptures. Maybe a place to start is the place of architectural structures in your work?
SHW So, when I started to think about the relationship between psychological and physical space, ideas of containment — as in, “contain yourself or hold yourself together” — came into the work. It’s a way to control psychic experiences related to the fragility of life, which affects people in different ways. Living in New York makes me think about fragility too. Buildings and train stations falling apart, or the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) about to collapse because it was so shittily built — I’m interested in the ways our surroundings mirror your internal world and how this relates to multiple selves existing over time and at the same time. People expect to be one fixed subject.
MK Can you say anything about your show at Silke Lindner yet?
SHW The show is related to cyclical time and containment. I’ll show you my studio right now; it’s bloody wax everywhere. The titular piece is Bleeding (2024): bleeding as a way of organizing my emotional states alongside my body bleeding every month. Red pieces of wax as “windows” are interspersed in these gridded containers made of fencing wire, which I call the “Cages,” interwoven with a waterlogged credit report, and a menstrual pad wrapper is about to break. The visible text reads: “Each month, we will charge interest on unpaid balance.” I’m thinking about my body’s cycles coinciding with economic cycles. And about boundaries and something being emotionally messy or bloody. We’re taught that this is embarrassing, which is often gendered.
MK Definitely. And it’s how these systems stretch our bodies beyond their limits and need for rest. The wire pieces remind me of Louise Bourgeois’s ongoing “Cells” series begun in 1986, which she says something amazing about, that I always think of: “The ‘Cells’ represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It’s a circle going around and around.”
SHW I resonate with those works and being trapped in your mind and the mind as refuge. While working on the show, I’m reading Julia Kristeva’s The Black Sun (1987), which is her meditation on melancholia and depression, which she describes as this veil over perception. It’s almost beautiful.
MK Right, the veil gives material form to this psychological space that is near-invisible from the exterior, or often dismissed as “imaginary,” but defines the way we move and interact. Obviously psychic pain isn’t just an illusion even if the thoughts darkening reality can be. Veiling also reminds me of your studio windows again, and what’s hermetically sealed from the outside to create space for something generative.
SHW Some of the wire “Cages” are actually lined with tulle, and the material is literally called “Illusion.” This interior vs. exterior dynamic gets to a crisis of existing, I think, in that we have this external self that we can never see; and all you can see is from within yourself. My work thinks about externalizing an inner portrait through points of mental fixation that might sound basic: health/food, money, coping mechanisms, and relationships. When I select and compose images or “ephemera” like “overcome imposter syndrome” listicles, doctor appointment reminders, and receipts, I’m drawing from this index of categories ordering my brain and interested in how it then gets spatialized. For instance, “Center of the Universe” (2022) at Bad Water, Knoxville, was a hybrid self-portrait and architectural model that collaged the “walls” of every apartment in New York I’ve lived in.
MK Could you speak a bit more about these ordered structures of self in relationship to architectures of culture, whether it’s porn images or printouts of Burberry fabric swatches, going back to what you were saying about control?
SHW For instance, “I Hate My Super Ego” (2023) at In extenso, Clermont-Ferrand, included a freestanding sculpture in the form of an architectural column supported (and constrained) by this steel armature, which I collaged on the interior with cutouts of images and text related to “commands” tracking the voice of my superego, kind of drilling certain controls into my brain. I also made a floor-to-ceiling version of the column in sheetrock, with the images hammered on the exterior, for “Locked from the Inside” (2024) at Chapter NY, New York. Both sculptures were the width of my body and titled variations of My Dictator (2023 and 2024). I wanted them to have a very erect and dominating presence.
MK LOL. What were some of the commands?
SHW This was August 5, 2023: You should already be asleep, or you will have a breakdown. You should not be watching Gossip Girl. You should not be on your phone. You are not cherishing this time. You should be reading. You should be a new “better version of yourself.”
MK And then fed to you like Instagram ads about the urgency of retinol cream. We’re either never enough or too much.
SHW Exactly. These things make you think, “I’m not taking care of myself,” when it’s actually unwell for people to be told to buy all this shit. The only experience I can speak to is growing up in the ’90s and 2000s Midwest mall culture as an able-bodied white girl. Victoria’s Secret and American Apparel were the epitome of sexuality and hotness at a young age. What does it mean when interiority is shoved down your throat in a certain way?
MK And how do you subvert it? Isa Genzken has been referenced relative to your work, and I’m thinking, if Spielautomat (Slot Machine) (1999) combines autobiography and pop culture, with images of Leonardo Di Caprio, Warhol, New York against this risk/chance game machine metaphor for capitalism, your collages have a low-fi “girly” memory box energy with aspirational quotes on stickers fighting the death drive. Can you talk a bit about the archival impulse in your work? Your use of material is both more “hardcore” and delicate than you’d think, and not in a gendered way. It feels more about life and time passing.
SHW I’m always thinking about gender, but it’s not what my work is “about.” Accumulation, for me, relates to psychological heaviness. I experienced the death of my mother at a young age, and that’s probably part of my obsession with futility. I have this work that has a Google image search of my mom with waterlogged listicles, privacy envelopes, grounding techniques, and personal photos. On the outside, it looks like abstract color squares pressed against glass, and it looks at selves as abstractions in a world that seems smooth and remodeled. Everyone is expected to be a mini-CEO, but interiority is really frayed and tied together with a zip tie. Cluttercore is another reference. As it relates to internet culture, it’s about feeling stuck in your head and the comfort of even being addicted to our anxiety.
MK And cluttercore as an absurd stylization of authenticity, which is a complex state. I do genuinely love this explanation though: “We want to feel safe, we want to feel comfortable, we want to feel protected and taken care of — stuff can act like a literal cocoon.”
SHW This reflects the moment we live in and, also, reminds me of how I grew up, in a family where maybe we didn’t have the money for the proper or exact objects intended for a specific use, but there was an approach, something turns into something else, and that’s good enough. There is a level of abstraction and ad-hocness that is emotionally straining but also beautiful. And it’s not just about my life, but — I hate this phrase — “the vernacular of life” marking time. I had to get a life insurance policy once and literally read the whole thing. It can feel like my brain works in fine print the way we’re always in this futile act of upkeep.
MK And maybe how dissociating is part of life? There’s the pathos of accumulation in your work coupled with a kind of exuberant brazen nostalgia, and then this smooth deadpan surface akin to L.L.Bean totes monogrammed with “Xanax.” It reminds me of how Lauren Berlant talks about opposing aesthetic registers in the “traumic,” what she calls “a genre that milks the formal likeness of trauma and the comedic: in a traumic, the beings under pressure and disturbed by what’s happened around them […] live with the light and heavy effects of damage […] which is to say, surviving.”
SHW I definitely see humor as a way of coping with a life that is painful, and that attempts at repair or coping at all can feel pathetic. It allows people to enter my work. For my show at A.D., I’ve thought about my body as a barrier amidst feeling I didn’t have control of my emotions and was reading wikiHow articles on “how to be a bitch.” I thought, okay, what’s my desire to stand in front of the door and scream at people — but I’m obviously not going to do that. I made cement screens held together by giant hinges, which dictated movement within the gallery. But as I was making them, they kept crumbling and required many layers. Repairing resulted in more fissures and cracks and became this idea of barely hanging on to take up space… hinged and unhinged.
MK It feels related to how power occupies space vis à vis historical minimalism — or even conceptualism — with your use of text, documents, and rules of categorization such that the emotional and “rational” aren’t opposed as is often assumed. Say, Freedom (Over Me) (2023) with printed credit card statements tracking your debt from 2018–23 plastering the floor. I want to call it “psychotic-conceptual” or “psychotic-cerebral,” which makes me laugh, but actually. And it’s not just a metaphor. Especially in the way a “disordered” mind can be triggered and prevented from getting care in conditions resulting from “rational” systems that govern our lives.
SHW People will say my work is diaristic, but it’s more about structures for controlling — or “rationalizing” — the self, with the text and labels in my work, for instance, being about this state of feeling invisible and needing to remind yourself you’re there by naming yourself over and over and saying, like, “Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie.” I think about how On Kawara dealt with time passing and day-to-day life. His postcards state when he got up — “I got up at 11:38 a.m.” — as if proof of his existence. I also went to college when post-internet was a thing, so I felt self-conscious that my work needed to be sterile and clean. When will I get out of my head and get organized to make the work I need to make? And then I thought to myself, well, this is my brain, and I need to work with it, not against it. Sometimes it’s ridiculous. I mean, right now, I’m wearing this shirt I made that says “POSESSION.”
MK “Possession” also, as in our minds are possessed by how you’re “supposed” to be. Maybe we can laugh at said systems of control to cope — or subvert from within, gaming the system by playing its own performative game, or acknowledging that we are always an amalgamation of selves.
SHW I love the phrase “how you’re supposed to be.” There’s this Sheila Heti book, How Should a Person Be? (2010). She also wrote Motherhood (2018), which is relevant to “Bleeding” in that it’s about her deciding whether she wants to have a kid, the ovular system, the desperation of living, and the absurdity of it. I think about Marissa Cooper from The O.C. in an interview about being an IT girl — it’s so dumb but another disembodied experience of looking at “me” through the world around me.
MK And maybe, how such representations ultimately become part of embodied experience. In thinking about fictionalized portraits of an author re: Heti, would you ever describe yourself as an unreliable narrator, or a kind of author of autofiction?
SHW I might name one of the works for “Bleeding” Main Character Syndrome (2024), or even before the Charli XCX album; this other piece is Brat (2024). It feels embarrassing, but again, embarrassment is interesting to me. Years ago, someone told me my work was a “fandom of self,” but that’s the moment we live in. It’s this mode of using the self as a starting point because you feel like you have no fixed self. Someone else once said that a lot of people make work about things in the world, but you make work about aspects of being in the world.
