Mike Leavitt Talks Trash with New Exhibition of Mutated Fake Out Branded Sculptures
Mike Leavitt’s art work has long been infused with pop references, from 2009’s “Don’t Stop Object Shopping” show where he collaborated with “bag painter” Chris Crites and the infamous ceramicist Charles Krafft and 2016’s “King Kuts”, where the artist depicted the “16 best film directors ever carved in wood” in a way which mutated their films and personalities into single effigies. In his latest “Trash Talking” exhibition, staged in a converted gas station, now art space, Leavitt takes on American brans, consumer culture and crafts them out of packaging from other branded products.
The message in the art is evident at first glance. Yet, I have to admit, there’s a secret part of me wants to wear a “real” pair of lego Adidas and wonders what Nike-branded Chinese takeout food would taste like. The consumer in me, raised on a flood of thirty second commercial pitches on sponge sweet Wonder Bread since before i could talk, finds many of these “Fake Out” products appealing, and that consumer is always here, lurking for a “limited edition” dopamine hit.
OK, let’s interview Mike.
Hi Mike, Let’s start…here. There’s alot of juxtaposition of mega brands onto each other , creating hybrid mutant results; like Marlboro/McDonalds Happy meals, Lego Adidas, Mobil oil drink boxes, and Nike take out containers, for example. Are all these conglomerate brands becoming one undeniable force; one ubiquitous all powerful machine?
I mean, isn’t that the reality of what everything is becoming? The Aldus Huxley theory of one corporation to rule them all. He wasn’t the only prophet on this. There is just so much conglomeration these days. These days? For years! For decades! Companies have been merging, folding and melding into each other. But for the majority of my pieces, there’s pretty specific reasons I chose to link the reclaimed packaging with the object I created. Lego and Adidas are both from Germany. The Chinese food take out boxes are made from the waste of companies heavily reliant on trade with China. It goes on and on like this.
Is the brand machine self-aware? At this point, are the CEOs even steering? If their actions are influenced by share holders’ unrelenting need for profit and bonuses based on a company’s stock price, it’s hard to pin down anyone for the blame. Is there anyone at the wheel?
It’s super hard to imagine that humans are still in charge. But I believe there are. I think they’re just so removed from reality. And I don’t blame them for it, because so many of us are. Whether it’s the backlit screen removing you from your physical space, or a profit margin removing a corporate shareholder from the realities of their company’s employees and consumers, there is just so much detachment these days. And none of this is to even mention AI.
According to citizens United ruling, Corporations should be treated like people. I’d dare say, they are more of a force of economical nature…
Dude. If that’s true, I just wish people would be treated like corporations. I think, before and after Citizens United, corporations have way more rights – so much more agency – than individuals. It’s just so wrong. And this is coming from someone who still believes in the core merits of free market capitalism.
Your latest exhibition Trash Talking is being hosted at Mini Mart, a gas station which was transformed into a gallery, micro park and cultural center. It seems to be a perfect setting for your new work. how did that collaboration happen?
Well for one thing, I was inspired to make a lot of this work specific to the site. It’s really just such a great story, and good energy really vibrates at the site. I’m also good friends with one of the three artists who spearheaded the project. I’ve known all of them for years. We’re close to the same age, they’ve been well established in Seattle for a very long time. I have not, even though I was born and raised here. Lord knows I tried. I only ended up showing out of town – LA, NYC, London, any place where my work would actually sell – because my hometown wouldn’t really have me after a certain point. For visual artists, musicians and most everyone else in the arts, Seattle is historically a great place to get started from the bottom and rise to a certain level, but then hit a hard ceiling. Despite the 16 years that have passed since I last showed here, and with all the changes that have happened since, my fear is that not much has changed. I’m a relatively out of touch 46 year old Dad. So really, I have no idea what’s going on.
…for the majority of my pieces, there’s pretty specific reasons I chose to link the reclaimed packaging with the object I created.
You even made a customized gas pump, with Coca Cola nozzle made from a wooden Coca Cola crate. It appears that various soda flavors rotate on the fuel price indicator?
Yeah I made the dials with lettering cut and collaged from beer and soda packaging. I felt like I was writing a ransom note while making the dials. So you can turn them to spell out various things, either by chance or by design. I planned them out to read beer, soda, swig, chug, bill, cash, mugs, wine, liqs and other words in reference to the kind of liquid this pump would serve, and slang for different amounts and costs.
Speaking of Ginsberg, do you think that, given who numerous ailments and age, she betrayed her own legacy, by not resigning while a democrat was in office? I have a pair of RGB socks and was a big fan, but feel kinda weird wearing them after the overturning of Roe….
I think that’s a totally legitimate gripe and concern but I don’t share it. I really try not to be too rearview-mirror, hindsight’s-20-20 when it comes to politics. History is definitely a guide and has to be studied, but for how to look forward. Even if RBG made a mistake by not resigning, that was her mistake to make. She might’ve been able to learn from it. We can learn from it. But what? Do we start leaning on Sotomayor to resign when she’s getting old and a Democrat’s in office? Is that what we’ve come to? I don’t know. Yes, we lost that supreme court seat. But we lost TWO MORE with Trump in office. Honestly I blame myself and many others for not rallying behind Hillary to win that race, way more than RBG not resigning. If she’d won, we would’ve had liberal justices in all 3 of those seats. I’d take it a step further and argue that the pandemic might’ve even been curtailed a lot sooner in the U.S. How’s that for political hindsight? Feels gross, right?
Your works are finely crafted, many are curve by curve near-bootlegs of the original products/objects, I imagine your process to be very exacting…
I think it just goes back to a super deep appreciation for realism. I also love making fun of products and consumer culture. Plus there’s a lot of fine craft in my bloodline. It comes naturally. My Mom’s super good with her hands. Her Dad was too. His Dad was a Norwegian furniture maker. And I find that the more I focus on capturing details outside of myself, the more I can tell stories with my work that resonate beyond the muckier confines of catharsis. I think art lost its way in the 20th century and I don’t know if it’s found its way back again yet.
You even provide plans for folks to construct their own sneakers!
Ever since I made my first cardboard shoe about 18 years ago, people have asked if I could teach them. It’s an old art class project long pre-dating my experiments with it. And the more time that passed, as I made more and more of them, teachers and students from all around the world have asked for templates and tutorials. Apparently I’m the only one on earth doing them well enough to copy. It’s hard to believe. So at some point during the pandemic, I buckled down and started formatting my own rough cardboard templates as downloads for people to buy, paired with sets of tutorial videos I could spend a lot more time and money to improve when those things were available. Really I just wanted to do enough to meet a demand, and it seems to be going well so far. This whole cardboard shoe tutorial side project was another major impetus for the “Trash Talking” show. I was about to make the whole show all cardboard shoes at first. But then a box of organic Disney apples – plastered with Mickey’s face – fell in my hands on a busy visit to Costco last Summer, while Ron DeSantis was fighting both Disney and gun control in Florida. And in the middle of all that consumerism swirling with people amassing shopping carts all around me, I wondered, “What if I made an AR-15 out of this?” That’s when the rest of the show fell into place.
I think art lost its way in the 20th century and I don’t know if it’s found its way back again yet.
Your piece “Little Carbon Footprints’ is a Little Tykes Cozy Coup ride on toy, constructed fro m four upcycled wood pallets. It’s pretty faithful to the original. Did you have a Coup laying round to reference?
Doesn’t every parent? Ours fills with rainwater out in the yard. And yes, I definitely used it for reference, measured or stenciled just about every part off of it. That was probably the most fun piece to make in the show. My daughter, age 5 now, loved it, still does. Besides using another kind of salvageable commercial waste – pallet wood – my motivation was really to recall the long moments of isolation as the parent of an infant during the pandemic, mindlessly pushing her in laps around the yard in that plastic toddler car. She’d be perfectly happy riding in her little car, facing forward, turning the steering wheel to nowhere, honking the horn, oblivious to the perils of the world around her. While I’d be pushing her, unseen in the back, with a heavily forlorn look hanging over me, brooding about the present, crippled thinking about the future. I really wanted to turn back and face that moment; face that demon and process that time by re-making the toddler car in wood. And now I can look back on that moment in time with a smile, albeit bittersweetly.
There’s a tribute of sorts to two companies who are based in Tacoma. Can you tell us a little about From Tacoma to Mars and Back Again?
The Mars candy company was originally founded in 1991 by Franklin Mars in Tacoma, Washington, just south of Seattle. Tacoma also happens to be where Fox News is licensed to broadcast here locally. Growing up, pre-9/11, Fox was the fourth local news channel affiliate after NBC, ABC and CBS. I never thought much of it. They seemed more fun, showed more sports, and licensed the cooler edgier syndicates like Married With Children, Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I feel a little personally burned by them, now with Fox News being what it is, having grown up consuming so much of their product, that I definitely wanted to take aim at them with this show. So when I found the local connection to Mars Wrigley, I ran with it.
I recently saw a posting somewhere (ironically) that a Gem Z’er truly believed that public phones was something that might not have existed, that was just a device seen in movies. i don’t get the “Birds Aren’t Real” level logic, but pay phones are odd to see. They appear so busy and appear to be giant bacteria magnets. We truly put our mouth on receivers out in the wild! No wonder we were so sick as kids. Your satire-infused version of the pay phone “Macintosh Killed the Public Phone Call” is infused with Apps up top and the forebodingly friendly Apple logo…
Oh I just revel in it. I’m driving this old 1978 VW bus around these days. I gave a ride to a friend in his 30’s that didn’t know how to buckle an old seat belt. Manually cranking the window was also a trip. And when I taught my 10 year nephew how to insert a cassette tape in a player, he wasn’t pressing the play button hard enough. “No, you gotta like, actually PRESS the button. You can just tap it.”
I think your other point about real things not actually happening just goes back to that whole detachment thing. The moon landing didn’t happen, right? The other one that got me for this show was this thing about discounting whether Wilt Chamberlain ever actually scored 100 points in a game… just because it happened so long ago and so few people actually saw it who are still around to talk about it. Hence the “Chocolate Chamberlain” shoes made with Hershey’s waste… because he scored those 100 points in the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania… where Hershey’s Chocolate was founded! I guess I just felt like I had my hands on so many different juicy elements for this show, and things really came together at some really nice crossroads.
This show is steeped with dark humor, for sure, but, with the amount of detail you’ve used to (re) create the works, I have to being that you, in a large way , love pop culture. If so, do you hate yourself for doing so?
I love pop culture enough that I don’t hate myself for it. It’s just part of me. It’s my history. It’s my every fiber of being.
Were you raised on TV ad its commercials? Is creating satirical works like ribbing a family member?
Look, I was born the year Star Wars came out. I was a latchkey only child of divorced baby boomers, left to my own devices for long stretches of time, kept company by the TV, cartoons, baseball cards, action figures and all the requisite commercial marketing that came with those things. If anything, I hate the marketers behind that – and those of the present day – who continue forcefully pitching to youth as a target audience. So yeah, pop culture, TV and commercials are A LOT like family to me. And ribbing them feels very familiar. I’m the kind of person who’s always gotten along with my friends and family – showing each other we love each other – by ribbing each other.
I can’t imagine that you are cloistered away like a jedi monk, these brands must feel like old friends to you. Does working in this type of satirical visual language feel like you are playing in a familiar sandbox, or feel like you are speaking in a comfortable dialect, like pig latin?
I definitely felt like that at times, especially deep in the middle of the process while making the work for this show. 20-something years ago, when I was just about to graduate from college, I’d decided I wanted to try to make a living at art but I had no idea how or where to start. I had tons of ideas. Too many ideas. The opposite of writer’s block. My prof told me that I had to stop filling sketchbooks with ideas; that I needed to start actually making something with my hands or he’d flunk me. So I decided to make something out of the sketches in my book. I thought of my ideas and sketches like inspirations, like flash cards I’d study. Then I expanded to all the other artists who inspired me. So the idea was – being a baseball card junky – I’d make trading cards out of my sketchbooks, along with the other artist who inspired me. For a while I considered making them into a deck of playing cards, so I could literally play with my options. And I’ve returned to that brainstorming mode a lot over the years. For a body of work, I can figure out my ingredients – the icons, elements or language I want to mess around with – but I almost never know at the start how to put them together. I imagine tossing them into a tumbler like lottery balls, or printed on the rolls of a slot machine where I can pull the lever to randomly pick various sets. I wouldn’t say they’re like old friends. I’d say the brands are more like frenemies. Sometimes we get along like oil and water. What’s that old saying about keeping your enemies close?
I love pop culture enough that I don’t hate myself for it. It’s just part of me. It’s my history. It’s my every fiber of being.
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