Beginning in 2017, Level Ground’s Artist Residency is one of our favorite annual programs, offering dedicated mentorship, training, and production resources to a cohort of emerging, underrepresented artists who each work to create a new project exploring the multiplicities of identity. This program, led by our Director of Artist Residency Leslie Foster, culminates every year in each artist’s first solo gallery show.

In this series of posts, you’ll read interviews with each of our 2020 resident artists: gabbah baya, Emmet Prieto Webster, and Coffee Kang. Having been notified of their acceptance in February, we were fortunate to meet with each of the residents in person before the pandemic. We’ve postponed their solo shows, which were initially scheduled for fall 2020, until (fingers crossed) summer of 2021, and all shows will be conducted in gallery spaces that have strict physical distancing guidelines and COVID protocols in place.

It is with huge admiration for the resilience, patience, and creativity of these three artists that we invite you to delve deeper into their artistic practices and residency projects.

Emmet Prieto Webster’s (he/him) audio/visual-based practice reimagines speculative cultures within the urban environment as a way to examine identity, language loss, and cultural fantasy. Subtle Center Founder and film producer Siona van Dijk (she/her) spent some time conversing with Emmet about his residency project Zero Paracer, which uses popular telenovela Rebelde as a lens with which to explore Mexican-American teen hood.

Artist portrait by Tina June Malek. Images provided by Emmet Prieto Webster. Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Siona van Dijk: Have you always considered yourself an artist? When did you know you were an artist or what first got you into art? 

Emmet Prieto Webster: I've always been an extremely high-energy person. I have to be doing something at all times, so that led me into unconsciously making art my whole life. I was always starting weird little projects and trying new things. I started intentionally making and labeling things as art a couple years into college. I’d been really focusing on music in college, and since I grew up making music in intensive communal circumstances, I was experiencing a sort of abstraction of community, which I didn't feel like I could really address just through making music. That's when I started making things that lived in this sort of in-between zone, not quite like music, not quite like high art.

SvD: Do you work with a particular audience in mind?

EPW: I always try to think of the people I'm closest to first when I'm making art. My little checklist is: is this going to entertain my parents and grandparents and siblings? Is this going to entertain my homies? Is this going to entertain my acquaintances? Then I work outward from there.

SvD: That sounds like it relates a little to the fandom aspect of your work. Fandom is a community, and that community builds around particular visions when it comes to art or anything creative. Is that what attracted you to fandom? 

EPW: Yeah, totally. I think that's definitely something that attracted me to fandom, especially and specifically with the novella and bands that I'm working with right now.

SvD: How did you find them? 

EPW: Rebelde, the show, and RBD, the band, are insane. They're massively popular. From a young age, I’d see kids with RBD backpacks, and it was sort of a visual language you could absorb on the fly. I wasn't really raised with a lot of television, so that's how I experienced it. I would just see it around. It was similar to a time when I was in high school and transitioning and moving to a different city. I had to find a way to cope, and I actually started watching the show to maintain Spanish. I speak Spanish, but it's my second language. My family has a pretty complicated relationship with the Spanish language. My mom was raised in a household where Spanish was the only language spoken, but they were kind of ashamed about it and wouldn't allow her to be fluent in it. I experienced not having Spanish in my life as a kind of loss, so I gravitated extra hard toward a lot of telenovelas and music in Spanish as a way to sort of recoup that. So I decided to watch Rebelde because I recognized elements of it from childhood, and it appealed to some of my other aesthetic preferences. It's kind of ridiculous and it deals with teenhood and rock and roll. I love it. 

SvD: What are your influences and inspiration, and where does that come from for you?

EPW: I'm kind of all over the place. I consume a lot of media in different formats, especially on the internet. There’s a few things that have floated my boat over the last few years and are an incredible influence on me. Hatsune Miku—she's a virtual pop star who began as a software for imitating the human voice synthetically, but she's grown into this figure with an autonomous artistic voice and brand. She performs via these massive holograms, and she's incredibly popular. That's something I think about a lot.

I'm also very into TV. I watch a ton of reality TV because it's fictionalizing real life, and it kind of confounds what it means to be a real person in a way that I think is really rewarding and funny. I also take a lot of inspiration from rock culture, which I see as a similar statement where you're kind of using this deep well of rock anthology to build yourself a fictionalized identity, but on a small communal scale. There's these spaces where people go and they dress up differently, and it just seems like another reality. 

SvD: Do you collaborate much as an artist? Is that a part of your work?

EPW: Collaboration is something that I feel I'm just learning how to do. It's something I have to practice a lot, and this is my first year I've been able to do it. It's the first year I’ve preferred to collaborate. I think so much of my art practice came out of feeling estranged from different people and places, so collaboration was a difficult thing to manage in that situation. But I recently moved back to my hometown, Los Angeles, and I've been really trying to work with as many different people as I can. 

SvD: What is your vision or your hope for what you’ll contribute to and gain from your Level Ground Residency?

EPW: Level Ground has been a joy to work with so far. I think Level Ground has a really great pedagogical approach to being this kind of art institution; a lot of the structural things about the art world and  art making are super new to me and not something I could have intuitively figured out. So Level Ground guides me a lot.

As for what I hope to contribute to Level Ground, I feel like I have a lot to say and do around casual art making and art that's meant to be enjoyed in a casual manner. 

SvD: As opposed to a more formal setting?

EPW: Yeah. I think historically a lot of fine art has been structured to deliberately be uncasual as an answer to these eternal questions people have about the legitimacy of  art making. I was really attracted to working with Level Ground because they’re very explicitly opposed to gatekeeping in art institutions. I think it's important to make work that you and an audience can engage with on any level. I prefer to make things that you can watch, even sort of not paying attention to it, and still enjoy. 

SvD: That's beautiful. So it can exist sort of in the background or around you without requiring, you know, a terrific amount of focus?

EPW: Yeah. I like for art making to be sort of divorced from educational structures, but I think a lot of art is born in educational settings.I feel really strongly that I want to make things that don't have anything to do with elite institutions. And I don't feel like an outsider artist, either. I'm making work that engages with memes or the internet or shitty TV. That's the art that’s on 90 percent of mugs. I feel like it's a very comfortable position.

Born and raised in Echo Park, Emmet Prieto Webster is a multimedia artist who explores cultural fantasies and speculative realities in his work. Find more of Emmet’s work on Instagram @aw_barely.

Siona van Dijk, MA, is a film and television producer and subtle body worker. Find Siona on Instagram @siona.van.dijk.

You can learn more and support Emmet Prieto Webster’s Level Ground residency project here.