A few questions with Justin Richel

Justin Richel’s new show at Young Blood, “Columns, Stacks, and Heaps,” is filled with seemingly innocuous objects. Cupcakes, milkshakes, ornate furniture, teapots, and all sorts of pastel and cute objects are arranged into precarious forms. Teetering stacks are lit aflame by birthday candles. Furniture threatens to come crashing down. The Young Blood show selects smaller pieces that Richel has created in this series of deceptively sweet work.

I felt some darker undertones in these pieces. I kept on thinking of trash towering above my head, threatening to fall down on me. Are you trying to induce a sort of vertigo or anxiety with the stacks?

The Sweets series is an attempt to anthropomorphize something that is man-made in order to talk about society with out having to point the finger directly. I choose sweets because they are very unassuming. On the surface they’re attractive and make friends easily but if you look closely at a cupcake for instance, you will see that it is wearing a mask. It is loaded with calories and trans fats and does not have its’ hosts best interests in mind, it clearly has its own agenda. I try to create situations where they become human in their context to one another.

The stacks and columns for me are about the precarious balance; they allude to the fragility of circumstance. For instance the stack can only exist so long as all of its pieces are cooperating together, to shift or remove a piece would inevitably send the whole thing crashing to the ground. So the paintings themselves become social commentary. I am fascinated with how far I can push it before it collapses.