Hazel Byers and Alex Da Corte at the Paris Review:
Well, in 2017, I stumbled across a photograph of someone painting the backside of Mariah Carey for the album cover, and was reminded there is some kind of invisible labor at play in all photographs we see. The video was born of that photograph. There is someone who had to light what you’re looking at. There is someone who took the photograph. In 2018, I made a film for the Carnegie International called Rubber Pencil Devil, where I remade fifty-seven scenes from photographs and fragments of culture I had collected from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I narrated while dressed as Mister Rogers. Seeing behind the curtain was a big part of that. The video has a title card that says LIVE + LET-LIVE, which was born out of this mural that was created outside my studio by a local plumber named Denny, using paint that I was getting rid of. He made it his business to paint a mural on this fence near my studio for every holiday. During the month of June, apropos of nothing, and also everything, he decided to write a big phrase on the fence that just said simply, LIVE AND LET LIVE. The rainbow serves a similar purpose. It’s just to look at and ponder. It’s not doing anything, but it brings out in you this desire to commune with it. We were never taught to do this. We didn’t have to be.
more here.
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