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Artist Information: @jodiwille jodiwille.com
Illustration by Dawn Aquarius
As a filmmaker, curator, and cultural explorer, Jodi Wille navigates subcultural spaces with independent curiosity. Unlike other documentarians, Wille’s work explores the personalities asking difficult questions and challenging convention by true immersion and, perhaps, the shared threads of consciousness that bring us together.
Known for her heralded documentary work, Wille and I discussed her process as much as what leads her into often mystical spaces eschewed by the mainstream. Along with the feature-length documentaries including The Source Family (2012) with Maria Demopoulos and recently directed Welcome, Space Brothers (2023), Wille has cofounded three publishing houses in Dilettante Press (1998), Process Media (2004), and Otherworld (2022), produced and edited several other texts, and her most recent project Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes, is currently on view at the Museum of Sex Miami. Additionally, Welcome Space Brothers is enjoying theatrical releases at select theatres and will be available on streaming in Fall 2026.
ANTHONY PAPPALARDO: There are so many directions we could go in, given the depth and scope of work, but I’d like to get into two major themes to start. One is this idea of “who not only writes history, but gets to frame it” and the second is understanding more about what drove you into documenting. Was it your upbringing? It feels like you don’t land here unless it’s part of your journey or you grew up in academia and picked a very specific lane.
JODI WILLE: For me it’s been a personal journey. That began with growing up in the Midwest in the 70s and 80s, in a small town in Ohio. It was a somewhat homogenized suburban experience, but my parents were teachers and were curious about the world. They were kind of like 70s Christian hippies. My dad was a biologist who got us into nature and collecting fossils. My mom was making whole wheat bread and sewing our clothes and playing music. I had Madagascar hissing cockroaches and a snake. We went to the library a lot. Most of all, we were loved unconditionally and were encouraged to run free.
Our family life revolved around our moderate Lutheran church, multiple days a week. It was a benign experience, honestly a little boring for me a lot of the time. But services were a place to drift off and envision things. I mean, I understood the value of it, the community. It was like the 70s liberal Christianity track—preaching nonjudgment, forgiveness, social justice, service to others…basically the core hippy values without the drugs or occultism or self-indulgence that shaped a lot of the West Coast hippy culture. Still, I felt like an outsider in my town. I was into the otherworldly, monsters, Bigfoot, and alternative music and film at an early age. I think all that drew me eventually to outsiders of all kinds, visionary artists, radical spiritual communities…and I just kept following that trail.
AP: Was there a particular figure who changed things for you? For myself, I can't think of just one, but there's a certain type of person I always gravitated towards. I’m fairly cautious by nature, but I was drawn to figures such as Iggy Pop or Darby Crash–people who have that charisma and the thinking to back it up. Those personalities fascinate me, but maybe that’s because I’m never willing to put my foot over the fence and go that far…
JW: (Laughs) Growing up, I was not a cautious person. I was kind of a wild child. I was drawn to people like Iggy Pop too—especially in high school—and I was into goth and new wave. Those were my people and that's what drew me into that space—I wanted to experience it directly, to be it. I was drawn to a lot of crazy experiences; it's kind of a miracle I'm alive after everything I did in high school.
AP: That's interesting. I guess as much as I call myself “cautious” it did feel dangerous to explore subcultures when I was coming of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s. During the “Satanic Panic,” some heavy metal kids showing you The Satanic Bible was trippy. But when you mention goth–goth music was the first style of music discovered that really felt tethered to the occult or existentialism. You could say the same about Led Zeppelin, to a degree, but that wasn’t my generation. The mysticism was conveyed as strongly in the visuals as it was in the music.
Something that’s prevalent in your work is this idea of music as a vehicle for ideas. That’s really powerful.
JW: It's funny, when I was in junior high, my sister was in high school, and she was the cool one with the good music. She turned me on to Black Sabbath, Bauhaus, Brian Eno, Sugar Hill Gang... I was so into Black Sabbath—maybe sixth or seventh grade—I remember sitting with that record, completely floored. I'm actually in Ohio now, visiting my parents, and I heard "War Pigs" on the radio yesterday and thought, this is a timeless song, it really holds up. I wish I could hear lyrics like that in songs today. Maybe they exist somewhere, I don't know. But music—I learned this especially with the Source Family—really speaks to the soul on a level that words in a book, or even video just can't.
AP: That takes me back to having to sit through Catholic mass in school and with my parents. The whole experience was visceral–especially as a young person when everything feels psychedelic. You have the light going through big stained glass windows, the mix of incense and old people, the reverberation of people singing and chanting in unison. Fast forward to my “rebellion,” and I’m going to punk shows, but it’s really the same thing–it’s Sunday, someone is preaching on stage, the place smells of sweat, cigs, and Patchouli, and everyone is yelling and chanting together. Maybe I subconsciously was replacing one with the other…
JW: I'm curious what your thoughts were as a kid going to Catholic church, because Catholics—when I was young—seemed very different from us Lutherans. I was a little jealous of the trappings and theatrics–we Lutherans were purposely so plain. But I also know there was a lot of damage for a lot of my friends who grew up Catholic. How did you take it in?
AP: The first thing is that I had never been physically reprimanded by my parents, but I got hit at school in first grade. I wasn’t familiar with the Bible verse about hitting children. I guess I didn’t get that far. [laughs]. I was really into comics as a kid. They were my escape. Both of my parents were working nights, going to school to get grad degrees, and I’d go to the convenience store on my own at 5 years old and buy a few different titles. Anyway, I’d get bored in parochial school and start drawing superheroes and villains. My teacher caught me and said drawing “demons that looked to overpower God” was sinful. The headmaster or whatever wanted to expel me. I was five.
Later it was challenging scripture in class. I’m not sure how much I’ve embellished these “memories” but I do remember telling a priest, “What if I just come up with my own righteous path, follow that, live a good life—wouldn’t God see me as a leader and not send me to hell?” I just didn’t do well with all the restrictions…
JW: So it led you to start questioning accepted reality?
AP: Everything.
JW: That’s exactly what I was doing as a kid too—just outside the bounds of my family, but also challenging my own parents. I'd critique their punishment methods: "Why are you doing this?” I'm eight years old. “This is only going to build resentment." They couldn't really argue with that. In high school on Sunday I’d wake up hungover and yell at my mom “I’m not going to church–God hates women–read the old testament.” It's the classic countercultural impulse, though the word itself means less to me now; the syntax sets you up for failure. "Countercultural" means you're against something, and that's always a weaker position than building a new model to make the old model obsolete. But yes, questioning accepted reality, challenging established institutions, and for me, and it sounds like for you too, pursuing a direct experience of the realities I was interested in, whatever it took. That's pretty much what I've done my whole life—questioning established realities.
Once I got deep into '90s counterculture, and the counterculture of the aughts, I started questioning that too, because I was so immersed in it—married to Adam Parfrey (Feral House founder), meeting that whole world of transgressive writers and thinkers. That led me to take apart and scrutinize whatever was in front of me, including them–and aim to discern what about it was of lasting value. I want to focus on what's of lasting value for the people, especially now.
AP: You bring up the early-aughts. I saw that time as a real shift of the mainstream perfecting how to really monetize anything “countercultural.” In fact, I trace it to post-9/11 America. I have this theory… towards the end of the ‘90s, technology was getting pretty fucking cool. Computers looked cool, the internet was cool, Japanese fashion was really taking a futuristic turn, but you also had the fear of y2k and it all crashing. Then the 9/11 attacks happen and we turn our cultural clocks back. Everything becomes retro, from fashion and music to movies being remade and cocaine having a big comeback. It’s a very spiritually devoid time–a real rebirth of nihilism, because why not?
JW: At that time I'd started my first publishing company, then my second in 2005, and I was deep into outsider culture and its figures. For me, that post-9/11 trend you described kicked off in the mid-'90s. Seventies culture was influencing fashion and cynicism was on the upswing. I was a young music video director and a rock band photographer then, so for me, the '90s were when the counterculture got captured. There's a book, Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, where a number of writers talked about exactly that in the '90s, and I experienced it firsthand.
ANTHONY: That’s a fantastic book and one worth revisiting now—the Henry Rollins chapter really predicts the rise of the “tech bro.”
JW: I got swept into the music industry of the 90s very young. I was assisting Sam Bayer, who directed Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit video, then I got hired to shoot photos of some major musicians and direct an R.E.M. video at twenty-three. After that, I was photographing and making videos for a lot of indie and punk bands and doing big billboard campaigns. I was documenting outsider artists and spiritual communities occasionally on the side—something I started doing as a teenager after I spent time with the artist Howard Finster in Georgia. But in LA, I was deep in that '90s neoliberal free-money moment, when record companies were throwing cash at the wall trying to find the next Nirvana. I knew a lot of people in the grunge scene, and by the late '90s I watched transgressive subculture take on a very cynical tone. And I loved it for a while. I was into it until the early 2000s, really, when I had my first radical spiritual experience. That was a pivotal experience and for me broke the spell of 90s transgressive culture.
And for some people the '90s were spiritual—the early days of Burning Man, if you want to go there, or a lot of EDM. That wasn't me; I was more into indie rock and punk–or at least punk boyfriends–and I was friends with a lot of bands in Los Angeles. Before that radical spiritual experience I just mentioned, I was a materialist and a bit of a hedonist. Silverlake was so different then–it was very affordable to live there and there was time to hang out and daydream, and there were a lot of interesting artists and musicians and cultural provocateurs around. But looking back now, what was it all about? A lot of the band photographs I haven’t even looked at in 30 years. I mean I still respect them all as people and as artists, but that world couldn’t compare to the thrill of what I was feeling when I was engaging with and getting to know these radical outsiders and spiritual communities– like Miss Velma and The Universal World Church, who I ended up documenting for many years. I should mention–some photos I took and the Christmas Special I directed for The Universal World Church in 2001 are currently on display, along with one of Miss Velma’s stunning handmade dresses, at the Autry Museum of the American West in Burbank.
So I got pretty jaded by the music industry by '97. I worked with some great bands, like Sparks, but I realized I'd largely become an ad man for the record industry. After a while I thought, this is so useless, I don't want to spend my time on this. I was working on a Dwarves record cover with Epitaph Records, and the creative director there, Nick Rubenstein, and I both felt the same way—done with a lot of it, even Epitaph. We were both really into outsider art and self-taught art, so we talked about starting a publishing company. My boyfriend at the time, Steve Nalepa (later a composer, music producer and co-founder of the band The Acid), had just graduated from Yale with a math and economics degree, so he ran it for us. We brought in Hedi El Kholti, who now runs Semiotext(e), and started our first publishing company, Dilettante Press.
That marked a real turn for me. It was that moment of hanging out with friends who were deep free thinkers and idealists, all of us feeling like the scene was done, let's do something meaningful. None of us knew how to be book publishers; we just figured it out. We decided to focus only on self-taught, outsider, and vernacular art. That changed my path in a distinct way, and I've stayed on it since. It hasn't always been an easy path. At Dilettante, we blew through all the money we raised, made a lot of mistakes making those books, and I had to work a day job for a couple years to financially recover from it. But it all brought me to where I am now. I'm really grateful for it.
AP: That's super interesting, because there has to be a spiritual moment or evolution in going from being the person controlling the camera and making your work, to having such reverence for other people's work that you put your passion into elevating it. That really resonates with me. It's not that I don't like making things, but I get so much enjoyment out of presenting other people’s work and hoping people feel the rush I feel.
JW: That really drives me too, especially to honor people who've made remarkable work and don't always realize its value, or who've been misunderstood, dismissed, or demonized by mainstream culture. I think a lot of that respect comes from my upbringing. My parents were and are very loving people who taught us to respect others and be kind, and I've always aimed to be that. My parents were both big readers, really curious about the world. My dad showed me the film Billy Jack when I was very small. I don't know if you know it.
AP: I'm not familiar with it. I’m sure several readers are gasping right now…
JW: It's a fascinating movie, made in 1971 by a filmmaker named Tom Laughlin. He was one of the few independent filmmakers who took on Hollywood at the time, and in a big way–stealing his film back from Warner Brothers, who tried to suppress it and ruin it, and independently, through his marketing genius, releasing it himself and creating one of the most financially successful independent films of all time. His film became a huge sensation in the early '70s: it’s a kind of vigilante hippie movie about standing up to injustice with courage, love, and, when necessary, karate chopping your adversaries. The filmmaker Tom Laughlin played a half-Native, Green Beret, martial-arts character on his own spiritual journey, whose girlfriend ran an experimental school for troubled children. New York intellectuals hated it with a passion, but it was one of the first films to cast and collaborate with Native Americans and became a remarkable phenomenon uniting diverse contingents across an otherwise polarized America–bringing hippies and red-state conservatives together in theaters to see a movie they both loved. My dad was really into that movie, and I saw it at a young age. He even arranged a class field trip to see it. He was kind of a radical and an amazing, fun teacher. He was very influential on me. That planted a seed.
AP: Something that comes through in your work–whether it’s film, making books, or curating–is this push-pull in American culture. What I mean by that is America is a country built on abundance—the American dream is about wanting more: more freedom, more money, whether or not that's actually true. Even with people struggling, we do have more “things” than people before us. But if you look at the popular religions in the US; they’re all built on restrictions–rules. Abstinence, “there are only two genders,” even the idea of tithing. You have to give things up.
The flip side is people you’re documenting and exploring using spirituality and community, communes, to push ideas of autonomy—the idea that anyone can come up with an ideology and let it evolve. And those are the things we call cults. So I'm really interested in your take: Why do Americans, on one hand, want everything, and on the other, want to be told, almost authoritatively, not to do things?
JW: I feel like America has been so many things to its many inhabitants over the years, and we have only a tiny glimpse of understanding of our actual history and the values and philosophies of all the diverse people who have lived here. So much has been diminished or even suppressed to perpetuate the ideals of those in power, like this ideal of abundance, which is essential to perpetuate consumer culture. After examining dozens of alternative communities over the years—including in the Utopia exhibition I currently have up at the Museum of Sex in Miami, which features twenty alternative spiritual communities that have existed in the U.S. since the 1700s, I think about restriction differently.
Nearly all of those communities had rules–and often strict rules–yet they were also wildly experimenting with the social norms of their time, creating parallel societies where people, especially women and minorities, could experience far more freedom than mainstream society allowed, especially in the 1700s and 1800s. Those groups devised their own restrictions and rules to make their communities function and also as part of their spiritual practices and growth.
I’m not saying these social experiments were flawless–they were a lot of things that are impossible to generalize. But these restrictions helped hold together and sustain many of these alternative communities for decades and lead them to a sense of freedom hard for many to imagine in late capitalist society. Restrictions helped groups like the Shakers not only achieve ecstatic states but endure for centuries, living a simple and seemingly restricted lifestyle in some ways, but becoming very successful in business and influential in their design, and for women and people of color in the group, especially, living with far more freedom and agency than they would have had in the outside world.
Restriction can sharpen focus, intention, and action and remind you of what’s important. You mentioned being more cautious now — same here. It feels like the right thing to do. I respect conservation more than I used to, which is a form of restriction. I don't mean I’m in support of restrictions forced upon people by the state or by corrupt leaders or fundamentalism. But learning to live with less I think can be incredibly liberating.
AP: I completely understand. If you hand me a box of thirty pastels and tell me to make something, versus handing me two colors, whatever I make with the two is going to be better or at least more interesting.
JW: It often is. That's how I feel about creative restraint as a filmmaker too—having a budget, a schedule, structure. I grew up—and a lot of people in my generation grew up—wanting to break out of that. I wanted absolute freedom; no restrictions. I thought traditions were useless when I was a teenager and I think part of that comes from watching traditions become hollow when the deeper meanings have become lost. But what I only realized decades later is that ritual and tradition, when they're filled with love and purpose, are the glue that keeps society together, families together, friendships going.
AP: Do those rituals have to be genuine, or do they just have to be genuine to the person receiving them?
JW: I think things only have to be genuine to the person in question. That's why people love to pick apart these alternative spiritual communities, aka cults—and love to say the leaders were hypocrites or frauds. I think a lot of that comes from people with very little direct experience of radical spiritual experience. The people I know who've actually had that experience have a much more nuanced view, and are often better at taking personal responsibility. They don't see themselves as victims. They're entering wild situations and that's exactly why they're entering them. So, I think a lot of these groups can be problematic, or mixed bags, but it really depends on the person and how they perceive what's in front of them, how they interact with it, and how they take responsibility for themselves and their own actions.
That's what I've found most, with these groups: it doesn't take a saint or much beyond the loosest structure of a community to grow as a human being, in ways that ultimately strengthen you, expand your ideas of what’s possible, and affect your community positively. You just have to really want to grow and be a decent person, and get back on the wagon when you fall off.
AP: When I look at the origins of a lot of these communes, the groups in Utopia, I see people taking on a leadership role, becoming a vessel out of a pivotal moment—trauma, generational trauma, something they can’t turn back from. They respond by having a purpose; something puts them in that zone of "I'm going to do this." I don't have the knowledge to go through all twenty groups you chose and analyze that closely, but I feel like a lot of larger, enduring religions have a purpose that's often about control. It’s not coming from that same place in many of the groups in Utopia. Whereas there's something very relatable about a human being called to do something, making mistakes, and evolving. To me the connective thread is that it comes from human nature trying to correct something.
JW: I think that's a valid point of view. Growing up in a Catholic environment where you got your hands slapped by strict nuns would absolutely shape your perception of religion and power—that's a healthy skepticism to have. For me it was different, because I grew up in a moderate religious environment where control wasn't an issue. I think that's probably a big part of what allowed me to enter these alternative communities with a neutrality that most people don't have. There are also those who grew up with no religion at all, and suspect it of being simply a tool to control others. When they think about Christianity, all they know about is the rabid evangelicals or the Christofascists they see portrayed on the news, and that perception feeds division and other narratives of control. I feel that there are more pervasive things in our culture controlling us and our minds than religion.
What I like to do is go into a more multi-layered place with these groups, through their lived personal experiences. If it's a group from the '60s onward with living members, past or present, I like to spend as much time with them as I can—including people who left. I've learned so much from getting to know people with lived experience. With earlier groups—the Shakers, the Oneida Community, the Moravians, the Public Universal Friend… how wild is that history? I try to find as much oral history or writing from the people who lived it as possible.
Also, as someone who's had my own experience of spiritual phenomena, you understand the validity of it all. Presenting the forgotten histories and archives of these kinds of groups, like in the Utopia show—there's a power to standing in front of the 3D artifacts created by the communities themselves. You can comprehend their reality more deeply than you would reading someone's book, especially a book by someone who brings their own limitations of understanding to the history, as we all do. It's humbling and inspiring for me to spend time with these artifacts, their works, their art—the work feels so alive.
It's process-based work, done within a confined framework—like a think tank of sorts where you get these really interesting people together sharing ideals and lived experiences to participate in something special that’s greater than themselves. It takes all kinds: people who just follow and support and then people on the other end of the spectrum—the free thinkers who question things and look at them differently and say, “This is amazing, I'm going to dip in here for a while because there's something powerful and real going on that I've never experienced before. If they leave the group without significant damage (most I’ve found have issues they work through and learn and grow from their situations), they often bring what they learned to the outside world in ways that benefit them and others. It’s the classic Hero’s Journey.
AP: I don't think it's dissimilar to things I've experienced myself. There was a period where I'd go to the ISKCON Hare Krishna temple in Boston in my teens. Most kids went for the free food; I just thought it was cool to hear these older folks—relics of the '60s and '70s—talk. And there was a curiosity, because this shortly after Monkey on a Stick: Murder, Madness, and the Hare Krishnas (John Hubner, Lindsey Gruson 1988) was published. So there’s the danger again, I guess. That’s what you know about the Hare Krishnas, but how many crimes has the Catholic church committed or enabled? These smaller groups are finite, and we barely have scholars studying most of them—meanwhile how many jackasses have a Bible quote in their Instagram bio?
JW: There are many respected scholars who've written books on and studied these groups for years. Compared to some of them…well, I can't say I'm a newbie—I've been in it twenty-five years—but I'm still very much an independent researcher, and I like it that way. Scholars are really important, though. People like Timothy Miller—probably the most respected field researcher and scholar on communal studies in the country. Christian Goodwillie, associate curator of the Utopia show, as Director and Curator of Special Collections and Archives at Hamilton University has amassed an extraordinary collection—printed matter, costumes, art from many, many largely forgotten communities. Gordon Melton is another major figure. Diana Tumminia—she wrote a great book on Unarius (When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group, 2005), based on ten years as a participant-observer. This book helped me a lot as I was putting together my documentary Welcome Space Brothers.
These are primary researchers respected in their world, but their work rarely crosses over into popular culture.
AP: Right.
JW: To me, their ideas and understanding are deep and layered, compared to what we normally see in mainstream culture—like the HBO doc series on cults, which often are salacious or lacking in real understanding by comparison. Learning from these scholars, and from immersing myself in the communities, is what really pushed me to want to tell more layered stories; stories that allow for a multiplicity of views on what the experience was or is for the people involved, with a baseline of respect. By the mid-90s, Unarius were dismissed as "kooks" by fringe culture heads. I felt that way about them. Years later, I came to feel that this is a colonialist viewpoint: coveting bootlegs of their tv shows was a form of cultural trophy hunting with no real understanding of what Unarius was doing. Like collecting a mask from Africa for your living room having only the most primitive idea about what it was used for and no clue about the charge a medicine man may have put into it.
AP: I do think there's a colonial aspect to it, but also an aspect of belonging. What I mean by that is you have people who will curate their reading lists and interests based on what Ian Curtis or David Bowie was interested in, to show they “know the artist” more than a normie.
The more interesting question is: why were the people who influenced you interested in certain things?
What I see in your work, especially in Utopia, is this idea of leveling the playing field to create an entry point. That's what I meant earlier about the lack of mainstream scholarship on a lot of this—the way you present it isn't editorialized. Here's the information and here's the feeling. That’s the most important part. These devices we carry around can’t replicate that–they can stimulate all of our senses in that way. Then–as someone inside it—you decide: is there other knowledge I want to pursue? Is there one person's work I want to read? That's what learning and curiosity actually is.
JW: Part of it, for me, is that I like learning things on my own, and I don’t want anyone telling me what to think or feel about a situation. I want to make up my own mind.
I think conglomerate media likes to flatten and polarize history, and they reach for the salacious, true-crime angle whenever they can. I think it's disempowering for people to keep seeing and seeking out these kinds of stories, where sincere people are annihilated. The truth is—and you can see this again and again in the groups I feature in the Utopia exhibition—a number of these alternative communities, from the Shakers to Publick Universal Friend to the Spiritualists to Father Divine and the Radical Faeries, moved beyond oppressive and violent social norms of their times to create micro-societies of their own design. And while many lasted only a short while, others endured for decades, even for centuries, and influenced the larger culture in lasting ways. They weren’t perfect by any means, but they provided working alternatives to the status quo and often offered more freedom for women and minorities. Many of these groups were on the forefront of movements aligned with abolition, suffrage, feminism, children’s rights, sexual freedom, holistic health, and ecological reform. When I think about the old version of reality collapsing around us right now, I want to learn from these people–those who were or are good at building worlds that they would want to live in, and worlds that are sustaining, cooperative, principled, and supportive to life. The idea that all so-called countercultural movements—again, that word is set up for failure–ultimately collapse or end badly, simply isn’t true. And these are not reactionary countercultural manifestations. Without fighting the existing reality, they’re building something new—what they think is a better model—in order to render the other obsolete.
AP: And mainstream media rarely tells you the reason something fails, or rather, they reframe how it failed based on a narrative or interest.
JW: Absolutely.
AP: I also think that in modern society, people love to binge everything, so they can get to the–usually ambiguous-ending, and then they can talk about it. Whether it’s a show, a movie, or a podcast, it gets to live forever in conversation.
People have a hard time with the idea that something like a spiritual movement could last two weeks or two hundred years, with no defined payoff. It's not a clean exchange of "live a good life, get X." Learning and growing without a defined goal can be a real turnoff.
JW: Well, most of these groups have a shared goal or ideal, which is usually embedded in the leader’s original vision. So there’s a north star that serves to keep people engaged and united, at least for a time. But it’s not a goal most normal people would ever care about or think is desirable. For The Source Family, it was the goal of ushering in the “Aquarian age” and becoming “Godmen,” fully realized spiritual beings. Maybe not an attractive concept to many, but the Source Family members were beautiful and sexy occultists and a little dangerous, too, which makes their story more appealing to a broader audience.
If you look at a lot of the groups in the Utopia show, you can see many had interesting style and aesthetics and wild interpersonal stories and histories, which are fascinating on their own terms, despite what one may think about their aims.
I was thinking about the Utopia show and the value of seeing art in the right physical context. It took me back to the winter of 2020, as there were rumors that New York City was going to shut down. Of all the impulses I had, I decided I was going to MoMA, you know, to visit some old friends before it happened. So there I am, taking my time, and I get to Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon. I’d seen it before–and perhaps it was the gravity of the moment–but it felt different. It was beautiful and grotesque and heavy. The room felt strange. It glowed. Maybe that’s the writer in me. Anyway…
I've had that same feeling working on projects—holding a photograph, knowing who took it and when. I'm wondering if you've had anything similar, across the thousands of objects you've probably come across.
JW: I appreciate you asking that, because it's something that drives me in a lot of ways–how things make me feel. I think that's at the heart of anyone who's an artist or who is intuitively driven or self-taught: you make choices, big and small, based on how you feel intuitively about something. One of the things that draws me into these groups is that I find they are populated by people who feel things intensely and are energetically sensitive in ways that expand their perception. And what I love about the artifacts and art in these communities is that they seem to carry a charge–a sort of energetic signature that's hard to explain, but it's a kind of essence that has its own life to it and can affect some people.You can feel it in their films too–you don't even need to see them in person, you can watch them on any screen. That's what I love about Unarius: when I sit with their films, something happens that I can't fully explain. They can transport you, if you're open to it.
So, yes. That’s what drives and excites me. It's this multidimensional thing that can't be quantified. You just feel it. And it expands your ideas of the possible.