Seth Cosford: Dream Memories
New York City artist Seth Cosford makes surreal paintings and sculptures that depart from reality, based on the idea that a deeper sense of connection can be achieved through an empathetic response to the unrecognizable. Each piece hangs on the edge of representation, dissolving into dreamlike images that feel like a word on the tip of your tongue.
New York City artist Seth Cosford makes surreal paintings and sculptures that depart from reality, based on the idea that a deeper sense of connection can be achieved through an empathetic response to the unrecognizable. Each piece hangs on the edge of representation, dissolving into dreamlike images that feel like a word on the tip of your tongue.
How did your creative journey begin?
I have been a creatively-inclined individual since childhood, my family always encouraged me to pursue my artistic endeavors, but I also loved playing soccer and doing gymnastics. When I was about eleven years old, I suffered a complicated athletic injury that made me unable to walk for nearly a full year. During that time I devoted all of my pent up energy into various arts and crafts. When I was in a wheelchair it was really easy to start carrying around huge sketchbooks or bags full of yarn, beads, pens, glue, and anything else I wanted to work with. I was like a rolling art closet! I felt so limited by my broken leg, but the satisfaction I got from trying out a new medium or figuring out a new technique gave me a sense of accomplishment I was sorely missing.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
I always feel like my work is drawing upon the body and its relationship to the mind. My personal spirituality is full of curiosity as to how the body exists as a vessel for one’s essence and identity, yet the physicality of the body impacts this essence in shape and form. I would have dreams of strange creatures with wild abilities such as biologically evolved wheels. As a kid, my mom encouraged me to write down my dreams as often as possible, and because of this I was able to retain very strong dream memories, even lucid dreaming from time to time. I find it interesting to pick apart the ways a dream can show you how your mind is interacting with your world, and the kinds of visuals you see can feel so vivid and real despite being nonsensical to your waking self. I’ve always had very powerful emotional experiences, and channeling that into my work is how I respect those feelings and let them go.
How has your work evolved over the last few years?
I never would have thought that I would begin making sculptures while in school for painting, but what I’ve noticed about myself is that as soon as I begin to take one form of art more seriously, I have to pick up another form of art to stay balanced. I used to spend so much time and energy perfecting a sense of realism in watercolor and gouache pieces. The results were many pieces with a kind of photographic flatness that comes with using digital references. I found that when I let go of the instinct towards realism, I started to slide into my flow state more often. Sometimes I get so lost in my work that time just slips past me like a babbling brook. The content of my work has been widely consistent in themes of the body and spirit, but I feel I’ve been developing better techniques as I go.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
I usually wake up later than most, doing a quick workout to get my blood flowing before getting ready for the studio. I always give my sweet little gray cat a kiss on the forehead before I go, that’s most important. At the studio I never feel too concerned with neat and tidiness, but I stay organized in that chaos. I maintain “Clutter piles” where I store tools by arbitrary categories related to their functions or to whichever piece I’m using them for. I can usually get into the flow of work after about a half hour of prep, but I have to make sure I keep track of time and pace myself because I have collapsed from exhaustion before. There’s nothing like that trancelike state you get into when a painting or sculpture is just creating itself. My art practice has been gradually getting bigger and more ambitious as I’ve been using my studio space to explore more avenues for creation. I often stay at the studio late into the night unless I had made evening plans prior, I don't like to be rushed while I work, it feels that time has strange properties when I’m really invested in it. When I come home I usually take some time to relax and unwind watching a show with my special baby (my cat, Selene) before heading to bed. I’m more of a night owl than a morning person so it’s usually pretty late when that finally happens, but I just function better that way.
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
I’ve had several impactful experiences, one has been my time dealing with illness and injury that changed the ways I navigated the world, I was also very impacted by the way I discovered the depth of my queerness as an adult. There’s really no way to prepare yourself for that existential crisis, you just wake up one day and realize there’s this huge vastness to you that you never explored. My paintings from that period of time really show a kind of manic introspection that I use as a guiding light in my later works. I also feel so deeply influenced and grateful for my friends in the alt and queer community out in Brooklyn. Where I grew up, I never felt like I could effectively explore these aesthetics and ideas. It took a lot of internal work and nurturing from my peers and loved ones for me to really come out of my shell and express parts of me I’d always been kinda afraid of. I feel like my work is inherently queer, and when I get to see these gallery and runway shows, parties and art markets, I feel like I’m not on my own anymore.
How has social media impacted your work?
I’ve taken some inspiration from the realm of alternate reality horror games, un-fiction, and various collaborative writing projects. I get excited to see what people can create online while taking advantage of the ways social media spaces impact the format of story telling. A lot of these projects come off as gimmicky and even pretty silly at times, but the passion and dedication I see from creators is inspiring. Some of my favorite un-fiction projects involve an immense sense of scale, like planet-sized entities or mountains with enormous living creatures inside. I love the way the social media format necessarily limits the viewers' experience of the events depicted. I’ve never been good at keeping up appearances on social media, but I hope to master it someday so I can expand my following and make a name for myself.
Your work has a strong sense of Surrealism. How do you come up with your imagery?
I draw from a lot of sources to create these images. In the early days of AI image generation, I would purposely feed them absurd sentences to see what they would come up with. Usually it was some really incomprehensible, blobby abstractions. I used a few of them to make studies, and from there I started to explore dream imagery for similar effect. The internet is like a dream to me, so studying the visuals the internet creates was a great way to get better at seeing my own dreams more clearly. Eventually I started documenting experiences I’ve had and things I’ve seen in the real world with this symbolic visual language I’ve designed for myself. It’s like not missing the forest for the trees, in a dream I don’t get to see what a figure actually looks like in great detail, they’re more of an abstract shape with a strong emotional weight to it that identifies the figure to me. When I paint dream-figures, I try to emphasize that spiritual-emotional part more than any visualization that can impact the sensations of the dream. I want my work to authentically depict something unreal, I hope it inspires people to dig deep into their own minds and explore the ideas they don't often interact with.
Instagram: @cosfordchild_no2
