John Felix Arnold III spent his childhood in the ‘80s riding bikes through Durham’s Forest Hills neighborhood, trying to understand how the world around him, past and present, was all connected—by bridges across rivers, by bridges across time. What did the living memory of a tree, or a home, or an old shopping mall have to say
about history?
Arnold, now an interdisciplinary artist, employs sculpture, drawing, installation, movement research, and new media to tell stories about the spaces we inhabit and how we relate to them. After spending years in New York and San Francisco, Arnold dropped out of graduate school and moved back to Durham in 2016 to care for a parent and to find a more stable environment to better pursue both his arts discipline and his sobriety.
Back in his hometown, Arnold found a burgeoning community of creatives who inspired him to double down on his pursuits and take on grad school a second time. In May, he graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill’s MFA program with a degree in studio art.
Earlier this month, Arnold and his wife, Tiffani Chan, set off on a cross-country journey back to California, where Chan works in academics. His new exhibition, Invocations of Entanglement, is a swan song for Arnold’s most recent chapter in Durham. The show includes charcoal sketches, repurposed home decor, and two short-form video loops that “act as poetic portals” and invite viewers to reflect on ideas of home, memory, and the intersection of nature and the constructed world. It is on display in the Vault Gallery at 21c Museum Hotel through October 26 as part of the museum’s Elevate series.
The INDY caught up with Arnold somewhere between driving through the Colorado Rockies and hiking at Canyonlands National Park to talk about the power of memory and nostalgia and why it’s important to deeply connect with the physical world around us.
INDY: What was the inspiration behind this exhibition?
John Felix Arnold III: I can’t say that one moment suddenly conceptualized this.
The 2D and the sculpture work are from my MFA thesis at UNC that I just finished. Putting it in the bank vault was something I’ve been stewing on for years, how to interact with that space. I have to give a huge thank you to John Blanco [former museum manager at 21c Durham] because he really supported that possibility. In 2016, I started coming back to Durham more often. My mom started to have some cognitive issues, and I was coming back to help out and went through this big life shift. I had been living in California for a long time and started meeting people in the art community here, like Will Paul Thomas and Chieko Murasugi. I started seeing Durham in this way that I hadn’t seen since I was a child, almost like I had this childlike feeling of immersion, maybe because I was gone for a long time. I also went into recovery from drugs and alcohol in the late 2000s. I’ve been sober since 2011, and so being very present and more childlike, something about that really made me question a lot of things about myself and my privilege, and the way I had learned about where I was from, and the way I was taught to see it. I started seeing the way that kudzu consumes shacks and old rusted fences and where tree roots are pushing through the asphalt. Nature is uncontainable. I realized that I’m not separated from any of this.
I got into UNC to do my master’s studies, and that’s where the rubber hit the road. The work is about this way of understanding and seeing the world as an entanglement and not as unique individual experiences that exist in vacuums. That’s the way we’re taught to see things. And in America, this idea of “manifest destiny”—I’m so glad many of us can see that illusion now, but it’s so indoctrinated within us. It’s a long-term process of letting go of that. This exhibition, for me, was really starting to see that illusion on a deeper level. Everything I do is informed by all the other things going on around me that went into it being able to happen. And so that exists on an environmental level and a historical level. That’s where Durham became a catalyst for me to see deeper into that entanglement.
You grew up in Forest Hills, a neighborhood with lots of nature and history. What about your upbringing there inspired this body of work?
I grew up in the ‘80s, so it was a different world. That little shopping center that’s still over there with the Compare Foods, I used to ride my bike over there all the time. We would also ride through the west side of Forest Hills up to the big Duke mansion that looked like Grey Gardens, and that’s where some of the objects ended up coming from for the show, which is a really crazy happening. So, on my bike, I would see all of these different aspects of the city in juxtaposition with each other, in conversation with each other, that were very separated but close to downtown. My mom would take me to this bagel place downtown as a child, and that’s where some of the desire to do something in the bank vault came up, because downtown was a ghost town. Growing up, things were boarded up, and there was not a lot of business. You know, that whole white flight thing had sort of happened.
It feels very Stranger Things. That was a nostalgia that the directors were playing on: the ‘80s childhood, where kids rode around on their bikes and lived freely in their neighborhoods and explored in the woods.
When I was a kid, and even when we’re riding as adults, when we’re in the landscape, in real time, in the present, we don’t question that we’re part of it. We’re enmeshed in it, wrapped in it. That’s something that’s really wonderful about being a kid, is that we feel so inside of the world. We are a living, breathing part of it, and everything is kind of wondrous. And also, we’re so curious and interested in it; we don’t feel separated from it.
When I started going to museums, I became more conscious, or critical, of the way that Western and American ideology framed this notion of the landscape. And I think this came out of the early modern period, going back to [René] Descartes. I find Descartes to be one of the most dangerous people in history, because his concept that our minds are separated from our bodies, and thus, quote, unquote, “man is separated from nature and meant to dominate”—it is possibly the most dangerous logic that we’ve encountered in hundreds of years. It really set a tone for a lot of systemic horror that is continuing to play out. That idea of separation is something that I never felt as a kid. This work is a way of confronting that conditioning.
Speaking of landscapes, Durham looked and felt much different in 2016 when you moved back to the area, and some folks feel like the arts were more prevalent, especially downtown. What struck you about dropping into Durham during that era?
I was coming back pretty regularly then, because we realized my mom had Alzheimer’s in, like, 2017, and so I think I was coming back once a month or every couple months. I’d done some stuff at Golden Belt, and meeting the artists there was really instrumental, because I was like, “Damn, there are artists doing really great things here.” I met Saleem [Reshamwala] in the airport in 2017 because he and [his wife] Mana just looked super cool and were so fresh looking. Saleem was sort of my entry point to a lot of the stuff going on. He introduced me to Gabe [Eng-Goetz] and Raj [Bunnag]. I was just in this mindset where I was feeling this energy from Durham that was really powerful.
Whenever I would come back and visit, I would go downtown and be blown away by the amount of activity and the amount of what I considered not things happening for a corporate result, but for grassroots, connective, creative, energetic growth. It really captivated me. I felt very proud to be from Durham. It felt like the life that myself, my friends, and people from very different walks of life in Durham—skateboarding, rave culture, the punk scene, and hip-hop and stuff in the ‘90s—those entanglements and scenes we were part of and created and pushed had progressed. It made me feel like all the nights of coming out of the Palace on Parrish Street and coming out of raves at six in the morning, those weird raver kids, smoking cigarettes, had seeded something bigger.
What inspired you to pursue an MFA, given that you’ve already been a practicing artist for two decades?
Being an older artist, this is a question that comes up pretty often. It’s really pretty simple for me. I moved to San Francisco when I was 26 from New York. I was reaching the end of a functional life because of addiction, and I did not really know what was happening. I went to grad school; that was sort of my answer. And I’m lucky, because I dropped out within a year and didn’t go into some crazy amount of debt and get a degree that I would have squandered. I left and then, after hitting rock bottom, I got into recovery, and my productivity went crazy. A professor, that one year of grad school, told me I should leave and get a studio and try to get my life together. I don’t think a lot of people who yearn for success understand that the successes that we think we need are often nothing like what we thought they were going to be. After years and years, it finally became evident to me, by about 2019, why I wanted to go to grad school. The work I’m doing, I don’t have the grounds for it, I don’t have the language. I missed out because of addiction. I missed out on so many years of learning.
Hồng-Ân Trương was at UNC as a professor I had learned about. I was told by some other very successful artists, whom I really revere, that she’s a really great artist and person to work with. I knew some other folks like Lien Truong and the new chair, Annette [Lawrence], over at UNC. They’re all amazing. And so it was kind of a no-brainer. I just put one foot in front of the other and hoped that they would accept me.
The exhibit is very multidimensional; there are illustrations, video, sculpture, all these different disciplines. How did you choose to express these ideas through those different disciplines? The one that jumped out to me was this big leather piece from the Mary Duke Biddle house. How did you come across that material?
I was driving through the area, and I saw that they had clear-cut the entire property, which was crazy to see. I grew up in that area. I don’t know how many acres it was, but it had tons of old-growth trees and greenhouses. It was a crazy place. They could have turned that into a historical site where they teach kids how to garden and about the interconnectedness of Durham’s history, you know, the difference between who took credit for building Durham and who actually built Durham. A developer bought that property and just ripped every tree out of the whole thing, the way that they develop now, which is just disgusting. It’s such a symbol of where we’re at in this country to me that they just pull every tree up, root and branch, to make these treeless developments that are just, anyway, whatever. I walked up to the property and told the contractor, “Hey, I’m actually from not far from here. I used to ride my bike up here. I’m doing this work around reckoning with Durham’s history and research into materials, found objects, and then looking through archival stuff.”
He told me I could have anything on the grounds I wanted and that I was welcome to go through the house and take stuff; they had gutted the whole house. But he also told me to come back later because he had saved materials, and he was hoping to meet somebody who might be interested in it.
Sure enough, I came back the next week and he walked out with that piece of wallpaper and said, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in a house that I’ve done.” It was a leather piece of wallpaper from the ’20s, which was a really bizarre time of cultural mash-ups and design. He also gave me some pieces of hand-painted regular wallpaper that I’m gonna give to an archive. I took it all back to the studio, and it sat there for, like, maybe six or eight months, and I just looked at it and thought, “What do I do with this?” So I started saying: Well, this came from an animal. So somebody had to have some company that worked with animals, and killed them, tanned the hide, cut it, sent it to some sort of wallpaper maker, and they had to turn it into this object. Then, they had to work with other people to go to this house and install a whole room of these things. The amount of connections that had to happen for that to get to [the estate] wherein the end result was just that these really wealthy people were like, “Check out our leather wallpaper room” with no conscience to who actually guided that to happen. Yet along the way, they’re connected to this entire, you know, assemblage of people, places, and things that put it there.
The other piece I wanted to dive into is this charcoal drawing of your mother. What was it like, especially as your mother was going through this journey through Alzheimer’s, to work on that piece, and to be that intimate to bring the art, which is the literal landscape of your mother’s face, to life and speak to your mother’s story?
There’s a lot going on in that piece, which is funny because it’s one of the more minimal things I’ve ever done in my art. It’s really about bearing witness to my mom’s journey and the lessons we can learn from watching aging and the real, gritty, but also beautiful transformation and realities of terminal illness and of our temporality.
The notebook paper is a direct connection to the education system and to the fact that she grew up in an era when revisionist textbooks were what she learned. So it’s this embedding of her wrinkles and her very time-based features into that space that once tried to celebrate this idea of “the Lost Cause” and all this bullshit, that is, to me, one of the most insidious things that’s ever been created. We’re living the continuation of it right now because it was never properly addressed, confronted, rebuked, or disciplined. In Germany, they have created laws and an entire social structure around how to not do this again, but in the U.S., it was like, “Here’s a slap on the wrist, but also, an embrace of these steps,” which is absolutely crazy to me. Using that notebook paper is a way of reckoning, on a tiny level, with that.
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