Chronicle 007—Wills Brewer

An interview conducted by Placed co-curator Kat Hodges, with the artist Wills Brewer, in June, 2025.

Features source images from the artist’s travelogue. 

 

 

Placed: You spent over a decade working in ceramic production studios in Los Angeles, while also making your own ceramic work. In your Placed exhibition ‘Trespasses’ (2025), your prints outweigh your objects, at least in terms of numbers – tell us about your transition from making earthenware and stoneware to working in photography – congratulations on your placement in the BARD MFA Photography Program, by the way.

Wills Brewer: Even in my collage process, and with the photographs and other source material, found photography from books, I actually gotta use my hands. I’m not saying this about any other photographer, but even when I take a really good photo, maybe because of my blue-collar origins, or an old, deep feeling of not doing enough, taking a photo is somehow not enough work, if that makes sense. I can’t take one single photo and be satisfied with it. I gotta do something else to it, with it, because there’s still a part of me that has to engage physically, with my hands.

The labor aspect of creating something out of clay is like construction work, where you’ve got to make a big rock into little rocks, or you’ve got to dig a hole, and the hole is the evidence of your work – actual results of time and physical effort. I can't do a lot of photo work on a computer because the evidence of work just isn't there for me. Yeah, so when I'm done making a giant cage out of stoneware that took forever, and I'm amazed that I didn't break it, that's a visible marker of effort, I have of something that I’ve made, which is probably just a huge dopamine rush I get, like completing an erector set when you’re a kid or something,

One of the first ones I did, I just put two photos together, and I was second-guessing, thinking, this is kind of dumb, because I’ve just put two photos together. But in my mind, regular photography is just one photo, so look, I’ve done more work! Of course, I’m composing, I’m making conceptual alignments too... working on a computer, my brain doesn’t translate the same, so I just print everything, lay them all out. I could use cut and paste tools on the computer, and throw things around really quickly, match the tones, photoshop, whatever. But, I like having a big pile of print-outs and photocopies spread out on the floor, and glue sticks and tape and scissors and an ex-atco, and going to town.

I’m doing kid stuff basically, which again, is not bad. I keep most of the baby scraps, lots of cut-offs and margins, and I’ll thumb through them a million times. I’m looking at my kitchen table right now, and it’s got an eight-inch pile of xeroxes. All from the past five years, all these different places, remnants, all mixed together.

PL: You’ve made a large artist’s bound book of a big stack of these xeroxes, right? Made from photocopiers at public libraries you use as a sort of travel studio, driving throughout the West and working as an artist-in-residence? I saw a big book like that when I visited your studio during your TinWorks artist-in-residence time.

WB: Yes – looking at it right now.  “Lubbock or Leave It, Texas”.

PL: Speaking of Lubbock, Texas – can we talk about wide-open spaces? You’re from Oklahoma, and currently live in Tucson, AZ. ‘Tresspasses’ features imagery from Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Chile, Montana, Oklahoma – and grew out of your time as an artist-in-residence at Tinworks Art, whose tagline is ‘Where Art meets the American West’. The description of ‘Tresspasses’ refers to your travels throughout the Western and Southwestern United States, and your collages and landscapes are referred to as ‘ruined and empty spaces’. Why are you interested in these remote, often neglected locations?

WB: One of the reasons I like to go out into those places is because they don’t get enough attention. These places are not considered monetarily valuable, most of the time – because the views are bad, or it’s flat, or there’s no natural resources there. That’s at least the lens of ‘value’ that is initially put on everything as Americans – monetary value. The region between the West Coast states and Denver is the most remote part of the county. There’s a very small percentage of people and a vast amount of space. Like Nevada, Wyoming, Montana – not many people live in these places. 

You know, Hillary Clinton’s campaign ignored rural areas – and it bit her in the ass. Bernie Sanders is the first presidential candidate that I’ve heard of, in my lifetime, or maybe since the 70’s or 80’s, who went to Oklahoma during a campaign, and he brought out 30,000 people on the single day he was there. Maybe that was an opportunity to change some people’s minds, about systems and politics – just because no candidate has even gone to Oklahoma unless they were already driving through it. It’s not a swing state. The places I visit to to make my work are wholly ignored by major cities on the coasts, where all the media is created. Which is the media that all of the people in rural, middle America watch at night. There’s no ‘after-the-news’ tonight show coming out of Tulsa, or St Louis. But – there’s value in these places. When you look at a night map of the US, it is a big black bar with a couple dots on it. But that blackness, or emptiness, has value. There’s cultures there, humans. Communities. You can’t experience a place in a day, or a week. At least, I can’t. A lot of the explanation I have for doing my work is the observation of place over time. The simple idea of what’s in a place, who sees it, whether there is any attention paid. 

And when I was preparing for this interview, I had watched the news for the first time in two weeks, and a kid was being deported along with his sister and his mother. He is four and has late-stage cancer and was being deported without access to medication, treatment – and he's a US citizen. That’s where we are now. I don’t remember the name of the prison in El Salvador, but he’s a US citizen, and that prison, or designated ‘prison-space’ is not in the United States. Guantanamo is not in the United States. I mean, authority should never be trusted. It’s like, oh man, we're here now. We’re in this terrible shit. When I think about that, I am reminded – Auschwitz was not in Germany. It was in Poland. It was on occupied land – that’s a similarity worth noting, in terms of this prison for U.S. citizens in El Salvador. I was recently looking at images I stored on one of my digital cameras, and I found photos I took of the surveillance bulb over Valentine, Texas, next to Marfa, which just looks for people crossing the border up from Mexico. Marfa is one of the most monitored, or ‘surveilled’ places in the country, and so is Tucson, where I primarily live and work. There are concentrations of the military-industrial complex headquartered here, with Raytheon. ICE has the same job as the Gestapo. I don’t think my work is intentionally, or by any means, purely political – but I also don’t think you can make work that isn’t political – because we all live and operate in these powerful political systems, economies, governments. I’m only speaking for myself, as a low-income person – but if there is any part of our lives, systematically, that isn’t good for us, there’s a reason for that, and it’s someone else's choice for us. As someone working for sixteen dollars an hour, there is a system designed to keep me where I am, working at that hourly rate. Except when I make art, which is a service I provide for myself.

PL: You bring up a lot of compelling topics – class, political representation, economy. The topic of borders, documentation, surveillance. What do you think about the current state of constant surveillance? Do you consider your own photographic process as an act of surveillance, in these remote, off-the-highway types of places? 

WB: Hm. Interesting question. I don’t think of it as an act of surveillance. If anything, I think of it as an act of paying attention. But, I am very aware of surveillance happening, and in what places – where and why… I took those photos of the surveillance bulb in Valentine. I always notice cameras – and there’s an idea that it's for protection, for safety, right? But for whom? Surveillance cameras aren’t really there for anyone’s actual protection, they’re there for property protection – to ensure people aren’t committing crime against things – spaces, objects, buildings, property. I think about this a lot. Fenced areas, secured areas, access. I’m sure security cameras have saved lives and solved crimes and been used as evidence, you know? But it's more about protecting spaces and places from people. As someone who currently works in a place covered in cameras, watching me work all the time, I think that’s probably more about making sure employees don’t steal. I feel that if an employer is actually a good employer, then why would I steal? Crime is a symptom of a broken society. I don’t know. I don’t know where this initially came from, it’s just something I always really paid attention to, especially security cameras – I guess probably because I did so much bad shit as a kid. 

I am documenting a lot of things, technically. But it doesn’t end up as documentation, because I’m ultimately messing with that. Almost all the collages are different places compared to one another. Then joined, aligned. I look for the visual similarities between distinct locations. It’s ultimately a fiction. That’s what I’m creating a lot of the time. I think, you know, fictions are hilarious and great and fun, and I think that’s mostly what art is. I see all these narratives, and threads that link everything – I have fun finding similarities and comparing information, and when you make two things black and white, you can’t tell two parts of the world apart from each other, you know.

 

PL: During install, you mentioned you were working on building a land-art curriculum / course. Can you speak to your relationship to the land-art movement, as an artist who also works in these remote regions of the American West?

WB: I don't consider myself a land artist at all. I used to be obsessed with those guys in my twenties, because they were the first people I was aware of that rejected the whole classic gallery set-up. But currently, I don't look at them the same. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret – that’s not the right word, I don't feel bad about that work being made. But I do think it's funny that guys who want to celebrate ‘the land’, went out and marred a bunch of stuff that they didn't really have any real relationship to, or understanding of. I think of Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970). I mean, no one would ever go to Rozelle Point on the north end of the Great Salt Lake,  just to go be up there. And in a lot of ways, it is a beautiful place. And one of the reasons he built Spiral Jetty up there, is that there was an old oil derrick up there, an actual oil jetty. The state parks department tore the old one down because it was derelict and this new art site Spiral Jetty had been built – but they were supposed to be in relation to each other, originally. But the old wreck of a jetty is now gone. Although there's still big pools of oil, dead pelicans stuck in it and covered in salt. And so many flies. It's a dump. Like, quite literally. 

And now it’s also become a road-side attraction, a sort of stage, with all these people coming out here to see this artwork. And it's become corny somehow, because of that. Some of that disconnect is very funny, right? But those dudes worked out in places that were incredible, and they wanted people to go see them – and they were meant to be monumental, this big uncontainable art out in spacious, remote, hard to get to places. It's not convenient by any means. And now, in the world of social media, it's a different thing, right? I stayed out there for three days, and you watch people pull up, keep the car running, get out, take a photo and not even walk down. I watched it happen over and over again. So there's a Warhol-ification of place. The work now becomes very tiny, and not in relation to place at all. It’s been instagrammed, continually repeated in a tiny digital square form – it's become incredibly contained, meaningless, in a way. And I find that pretty fascinating. 

And Michael Heizer’s ‘City’(2002), in my opinion, is a monument to himself – his grandfather was a mining guy, he grew up with an archeologist dad, and would go to Mexico and South America all the time on these digs, uncovering and studying ancient indigenous sites – and he uses a lot of that style and iconography in what I see as an entirely ironic way. You have to wonder what the native people in Nevada think of that whole thing. It's so funny to me. ‘City’ was damn expensive! You know, it cost like 40 million or whatever, to build, and probably even more than that because of all the subsidies and tax breaks he got from growing alfalfa on the rest of that land he owns. The amount of art-world power and money invested in ‘City’ – I mean, forgiven loans from wealthy art people, huge grants from art foundations – in part so that he could buy all that land from the U.S. government. But that land had been seized, from the Paiute and Shoshone tribes.* So, a real shady deal there. And he grows the most water-exhaustive crop possible out in the Nevada desert, runs cattle – that's where he gets all those tax breaks, part of how the funding structure works. And it’s odd to me that no one really talks about any of that. Like, what was the exhaustive effort, just in carbon alone, to get all those square miles of gravel hauled out there? To look like an ancient Mayan site, built by a white-guy land artist. And only six people can see it each day – an enormous thing, both in size and cost, not to mention the land grab, has been made for the smallest percentage of people to have access to. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. But it is hilarious.

*Heizer claims that the land he now owns and where ‘City’ is built, which had been ancestral Paiute and Shoshone land, is “in his blood” due to his grandfather leaving Virginia and arriving in Nevada in the 1880’s. Heizer’s grandfather became involved in the mining industry and eventually operated Nevada’s largest Tungsten mine. 

PL: Tell me more about place, fictions – you’re not a land artist, but these territories, these landscapes, fenced places, are central in your work. You’re taking a different approach than these other artists. Say more?

WB: I mean, it echoes with something we were just talking about, how I don't want to make sad work. And definitely some of it is funny, darkly funny, but the story in every place is the exact same. Whether it's, you know, colonization, or occupation, or a powerful entity designating a place, or surveilling a place, or land grabs and creating reservations so that you can displace a people, and then taking that reservation land back later on, so Heizer can make a monumental land art piece, I guess? But it's the same story, right? I’m interested in how it's essentially all the same story.

I realize I feel like I'm about to rag on journalism, but I don't think you can accurately go paint a picture of a place in a brief amount of time. Granted, journalists talk to people, which is key for getting context – how people live in, and feel, about the place they're in. My thinking is that the story in every place is the exact same kind of thing, it's a shitty group of people taking another people's shit in different ways, which are inherently violent most of the time. Or, it's like – just ruining the place itself. I got meta about it, I had this giant floor space with eight hundred photos on it, and doing a red string conspiracy math, making connections. I was just realizing, it’s all the same. The names are the only thing different. The interesting thing is how these places are culturally distinct, how people deal with similar situations differently, and the aesthetics are different. That’s the fun part for me, because I’m not necessarily trying to make bummer work. On the other hand, I also don’t want to put Vaseline over anything, make it look softer.

I find humor in a lot of it, like, my piece ‘Eden, Kansas’ – a section of that collage is from S.P. Dinsmoor’s ‘Cabin Home and Garden of Eden and Cabin Home’ (1904) in Lucas, Kansas. That’s one of the oldest folk-art, outsider art things in the U.S. He built it for himself – he built a Garden of Eden for himself! Out of concrete! He was a religious fella, trying to resolve his faith in God with the atrocities he’d witnessed in the Civil War. I mean, who thinks of concrete and the Garden of Eden? Concrete for paradise is so funny. I took his Adam and Eve figures and put them in a different context, out in the desert in Utah, then placed them on an antelope hide I had skinned.

Wills Brewer - Eden, Kansas 2025

PL: I want to return to something you said in your previous comments, in terms of exhaustive effort, and the land-use issues you bring up in regard to Heizer’s ‘City’. I’m reminded that when we were both in Montana, you mentioned economies-of-scale, and how your work is shaped by a very systematic and cost-effective approach. Can you elaborate on that? It seems almost something you enjoy, a condition you use as a collaborating factor in your work rather than a limitation.

WB:  I mean, you asked earlier about my work shifting from ceramics to photography. When I started doing the photo stuff, it was because I was moving away from ceramics. And that was for lots of reasons, and I still have my ceramics practice, but I was just more on the road. You can’t do ceramics on the road, in any practical sense. I also didn’t want to try – the logistics of it all. Clay is heavy, objects are big, kilns are infrastructure, they are fixed in place, everything is super delicate and can break. So photography had a practicality to it. I’ve been traveling a lot, and I travel light – the opposite of ceramics. I started just by taking photos of everything, because I got this, sort of, new gaze. I found everything interesting, because I could see this crazy interconnected web. In the sense of – you throw something away, and it goes away out of your view, but every landfill eventually is going to get back to us. Doesn’t matter where it’s at. 

And yeah, I had written something down, after I got your questions, and it was really refreshing to read it again today when I was going through my notes, how you said specifically, blue-collar. Do I think of myself as a laborer? Yeah, I have always been hourly, in however I get paid, for the most part – with the exception of my work, my art, which is sold as a consumable, it’s an object, ultimately. It’s not a service. I mean, it is a service, but one I provide for myself. I do think about working, in that sense – but I don't frame what I do with art entirely as an hourly-wage thing. I used to, and it really put a damper on it. And that's when I think I started building other value systems. I was looking at art like a second job, making objects to sell in stores, and it needed to be worth it. But I realized that didn’t help, looking at it like that, because that's how other people have framed my value my entire life. Now my practice is some semblance of trying to reverse that back. When people inquire about my work, I tell them how many hours it is. I’ll tell them how much I spend on materials. Yeah, the only reason not to be transparent about anything with money is because there’s something unethical going on, at least in my mind. I want to be candid about that part of it. I'm not trying to do this to get rich. I'd rather be heard than paid.

I mean, I like systems, and I look for them. I started working for Lumber Club in Marfa where I was just standing eight hours a day, every day, basic labor, right? And I was really trying to learn their systems, and we're sending these stool tops. I was like, okay, it's 50 turns per stool per grit. So when we go through five grits, so 250 rotations – this is just what I do in my head. I count. I don't know whatever part of my mind that is, maybe it’s because I typically don't have a lot of resource, I have to pay attention to it as it dwindles, especially with clay, because even if you can go buy another bag, it's going to take time for it to get dry enough to work on. I really try to conserve my materials, because they're valuable, and I don't like waste. Also, I’m not really in a position to waste anything right now. It’s both a reality and an ethos. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, I’m headed to Bard to study this summer, and I think about this in the context of going to Bard. I got advice from someone who went there and also used to teach there and she said to me, ‘who you are is not represented well there’. Her immediate observation of me as a person was like, ‘I can tell that you have a really hard time with authority.’ Very fair. I didn't realize that was so easily read about me. But, wealth is not a determination of cognitive function at all, or opinions that are valid and good. 

PL: You mentioned that ‘Trespasses’ was fairly biographical. Clearly, a lot of themes we have already discussed are present in the show. I noticed something in the exhibit that in addition to the themes about space, territory, fences – is the question of figuration. There are a few obscured figures, lots of buildings, structures, and places. Except for the concrete statues in ‘Eden, Kansas’, there are few complete, or whole figures. I sense a kind of absent figure, and it begs the question as to how this exhibit as a whole might function as a self-portrait. Is there any truth to that? About how this show is personal, biographical? I think at first glance, the show is most evidently about place and boundaries, but on a quieter level, I feel like the show is also about someone being somewhere, belonging somewhere.

WB:  Yeah, I think there is some truth in that. It’s kind of sad. There’s some sad vibes.

All this work is completely about my feelings over the things that I've seen, I guess. The town in Oklahoma I'm originally from, there's all the tornado damage. You can see that tornado damage in a few prints I exhibited at Placed. That happened last year when I was in Montana. I missed a lot of disaster last year, missing the floods in North Carolina by a week or so. Missed the LA wildfires by about two days.

I've got photos of all these different places that I was in. Some of the imagery in the show is taken from a book about Native American history – which is largely and very  untrue, but the photos are fantastic. But then, making all this work for this show, putting everything together, all these sources and pictures are mixed in with all my other photos. They're my personal photos too, going back through the whole travelogue – you know, hanging out with friends or whatever. And it's like, oh my god, all these places, all these documents are now attached to my life – heavy, good or bad moments in my life.

You know, when all those little babies, the college students, showed up at the ‘Tresspasses’ opening and were asking me a million questions – that was so much fun. I was telling them the exact details of all the things and the photos and why I found them relevant to each other. I was reminded of talking to my landlord back in Tucson, who I showed the work to before I packed up for Montana. She's 74, I showed her the work, she came over and I had them all up on my wall. She was like, I get this feeling of boundary in relation to place in your work. I've never told her anything about my work. Obviously she had the eye for it, thank god. Whatever loose idea I had as a whole, a lot of it she picked up on. That was great. I didn't need to explain. I didn’t have to say, yeah this is my hometown, my dad's friend's business that got destroyed by a tornado, this is a photo of it, a place that I haven't seen in almost 20 years, you know. That picture is crazy, the building just had the entire front of it torn off, and you can see inside from the street, to the clothes still just hanging there. So there’s a personal connection, yeah – but my hope is that the work matters, or is legible, without it.

PL: In terms of biography, I was thinking about the nature of identity in your work – you’ve talked a fair amount about a blue-collar approach, and I was also perceiving a shadow of religious themes, and your photos also being about the nature of the sacred, or some type of reverence. Is that fair to say?

WB:  I grew up going to Baptist Church, and I think I cared about that when I was seven or eight, for a minute. But I’m also the kid that figured out that wasn’t real through logic, before that, when I was like four or five. I’m constantly trying to challenge that stuff, always been like that. You’re telling me this dude made all that bread and fish? What did that actually look like? Did it come out of his hands? Each bread and each fish? Did it disappear? He walked on water? I mean, I don’t know.

But in terms of reverence, I think that’s actually a great word for that aspect of the show. For the attention paid. I don’t know if that’s something I’m fully consciously doing, although I do often think, or feel, that… you know, you can visit a place, or walk into a space and be like, moved, like gee, holy crap. Where a place just looks, or feels, amazing. Like the concrete bible world in Kansas. It’s amazing. I love that abandoned buildings are revered by the teenagers that use them – it’s their little church, you know? Those are community spaces, gathering places. Skate parks, you know, I like that type of use. Finding a private little space for you and the homies is a very important thing to find. Here’s to making forts.

I guess, you know, the creation of things, making artwork and finding these things and places and building something out of clay, asking questions and trying to find answers. I guess that's no different than someone going to church. I'm just doing it for myself. Instead of asking some guy that reads the Bible and then tells me what to think, or what to do. Making things, photos, objects – going to places and being there, taking pictures and then laying them all out on the floor to start to piece together and make connections, compose collages, driving at sunrise or sunset in the desert, those are the gods I pray to. I guess I don't think any person can be devoid of, for lack of a better term, religious value as a human, because your mind is an expansive, infinite creation.

PL: You’ve made a number of references to working ‘like a kid’, or you reference kid-like things quite often – erector sets, forts, making collages as ‘kid stuff’. But, many of your themes and interests seem pretty grown-up – politics, land-use, surveillance, economy, place, belonging. Can you speak to that a little more?

WB: When I say ‘kid-stuff’, I’m referencing more of my process, which is pretty much play. Experimenting, problem-solving, forming things with my hands and my mind. I think all art creation is kid stuff, because it is play. Intellectual and material play. In terms of the subject matter, when you’re, you know, at the bottom of the pyramid, or directly affected by these things, it's one of the only things you can do about it, have a sense of humor and a creative response.

PL: Last question: one of the parts of your show that I really appreciate is your custom framing – just a very simple, warm natural wood, tightly framed onto the image. You had a specific reference – can you talk quickly about your framing process for ‘Trespasses’?

WB: I bought a painting from the fifties, from a friend of mine, an antique dealer, sort of an outsider art dealer, this abstract painting, and the artist, she just got quarter inch wood strips and nailed them directly onto the canvas stretcher bars – completely simplified the framing convention, and it looked really nice, boxed in really wonderfully, super simple. I don’t always have the money for framing, and also, I like doing everything myself. I know how to do things, so – that wood was found by a buddy of mine, who does construction in Montana. It was a really old piece of pine, from a barn salvage, and it was probably a hundred years old, the grain on it was basically like a hardwood. It was just too good to pass up. To have something old, built, torn down, from the area of the show – I wanted to use that found material. I mean, I’ll just say - the carbon footprint was pretty low on it.