What have you been working on in your studio?

I've brought out a couple of things I've been doing. These are some sculptures that I'm going to have at the Joanna show. Only one of them is finished - that golden one right there.

Have you worked in sculpture before?

Yeah. I have my bachelor's degree in sculpture from the University of Houston, but I actually spent most of my time making drawings because that's what I've always liked doing best. I actually think that my sculptures are better a lot of times than my drawings but it's just a different process. I actually like making drawings more than making sculptures because they're more detached from the creation. But a lot of these are old busts - I really like busts. I'm messing around with different materials right now. I don't know what I'm going to keep and what I'm going to discard, but it's fun, it's different. It's totally different. I actually enjoy it a lot; it's a lot more physical. For a lot of these, I'm breaking them with this hatchet that I bought at Southland Hardware - this little guy. I got this and I go out and take these busts and I'll just be sitting outside and chopping them off like this. And last time I did this, my neighbor who I've never met before came by, and I was sitting there with a hatchet in my hand going like "uhhh..." I should be more careful with this. This blade is actually probably really dull. I even bought a little saw at Home Depot, but it's so much more fun to just chop them off.

Is this [grid painting] a work in progress?

Yeah, I've been working on this on and off for the last eight months.

The painting that won the Hunting Prize [Books I Have Possessed] was the grid of novels, right?

Yeah, just books.

So this is a similar kind of thing?

Yeah. I pretty much only worked on paper and anytime you do anything on paper, it's considered to be a drawing. I went to frame that piece that won the Hunting Prize and it cost like $700, which is just - once you want to start working big ... I don't mind just like tacking a drawing up on the wall like that, but people want to have them in a nice frame, so I decided I'd try to do paintings instead. It's a challenge, because I've just worked in the medium of paper and watercolor and pen for the past four or five years, and I really enjoyed it, but I wanted to do something different now. My friend suggested, she was like you should make a painting of other paintings, and I was like, alright, well that sounds cool, because I really wasn't sure what I wanted to make. And in the process, I watched Orson Welles's last documentary he made, called F is For Fake, which is based off this book that's out of print--I think they only printed one edition of it. But I got really into this idea of making these really crappy fake paintings, and so that's kind of been snowballing. At first I just did it and I wasn't sure if I was going to continue, but it really got to the point where it became kind of fun. But it's really time consuming and it's one of those things that ... I'm really like ADD and can't really concentrate on things, but only in art, not in real life. So I just get really scatterbrained and I'm doing like a million different things at once.

When you started doing this type of organization with your paintings - the grid or the matrix - did you start with books?

I started just doing heads. I was doing drawings of heads and I'd write a name under it. I think the first one I made was this drawing that I gave to my friend that was like "characters and writers who suffered from the disease of loneliness" or something. And it was just these random heads with like "Nietzsche" or "Dostoevsky", "Raskolnikov", all these random people. I kind of like bringing in that stuff and I like lists and I like a lot of information. With this in particular, I was thinking of kind of like a Tumblr blog where it's just all these random images put up into one thing. I'm really attracted to that because you can not like this little part right here but maybe you like this one. Sort of calling into question meaning, like what does this all mean, to put all this stuff together, because I honestly don't know and hopefully I'm the last person you'll ask about something like that.

Do you feel like it makes you take on the role not just of painter but of curator?

Yeah. I just quit my job, and my last job was where I was essentially the assistant director of a gallery in town and I enjoyed that, but my friends started calling me "the curator." My friend was telling me instead of "Thug Life" I should get "Curator" tattooed across my belly. To me, that idea extends even further than curating a show or picking out what paintings to put into this. I feel the same way about music, and I go to the record store and pick out the music that I want. It's about collecting these different things and not really just concentrating on one thing. Once you find something, you want that next new thing: "I have Leadbelly, what's next, probably Robert Johnson, and then I want..." One thing leads to the next, and that's what I'm interested in because I'm never sated, I'm never happy with any one thing I do. So I'm always looking for something to take me to whatever the next step is.

You talk about this painting in terms of the people who view it and how they can take what they like, but as the person putting it all together, do you feel like you're expressing something about your personal taste since you're the one selecting it all?

Yeah, I had a show in Austin and I titled it "Things That Own Me" because I got really into Georges Perec, who's a French writer. I bought this book called Species of Spaces and Other Pieces and he writes about the most mundane things in the most amazing ways. This one article in particular is called "The Objects That Are On My Work Table" and in this last paragraph he says ... he's talking about everything on his table where he writes and about his process, about how before he starts a new piece he clears off his table, cleans it, and puts only those things that he wants on the table. And that really got me thinking, because I'm an obsessive collector of records, and books, and art and stuff like that. What does that say about me as a person? In the last paragraph, he says "Thus a certain history of my taste, their permanence, their evolution of phases, will come to be inscribed in this project. More precisely, it will be, once again, a way of marking out my space, a somewhat oblique approach to my daily practice, a way of talking about my work, about my history and my preoccupations, an attempt to grasp something pertaining to my experience, not at the level of its remote reflections but at the very point where it emerges." And that was just like, boom, that just totally got me, because I'm like a pack rat, and what does that say about me, what I'm obsessed with and what I won't ignore.