We stopped by the Snarkitecture founder's Long Island City studio as he prepared for his latest show with Perrotin New York.


Photography by Doosoo Kim

Daniel Arsham&rsquo;s Long Island City art studio is a canvas in and of itself. Blindingly white&mdash;including walls, ceiling, embedded art pieces (i.e. a protruding figure trapped between paint and wall frame), and staff uniforms (crisp lab coats)&mdash;it&rsquo;s both chaotic and oddly minimalist. The chaos comes from all the bodies buzzing around the ground floor, an office space shared with art/architecture collaboration Snarkitecture, which Arsham co-founded with Alex Mustonen in 2008, and a multi-room workshop soundtracked by drilling noises.

The second floor conference room, furnished with exacting symmetry by Snarkitecture, features a sprawling, serene view of the East River. It&rsquo;s where we sit down, cans of La Croix on hand, to talk a bit about his latest exhibition for Perrotin New York titled&nbsp;3018&mdash;the one all the bodies downstairs are helping Arsham prepare for. &ldquo;This exhibition,&rdquo; Arsham says, &ldquo;I&#39;ve been working on for almost two years, so there&#39;s a constant struggle between thinking about new ideas and implementing ones which are two years in the past.&rdquo;

The new pieces in&nbsp;3018&nbsp;perpetuate Arsham&rsquo;s fascination with destruction and rebuilding. Among the stars is a recast 1961 Ferrari 250GT California, recognizable for its role as an object of lust in&nbsp;Ferris Bueller&rsquo;s Day Off&nbsp;[1986]. Cartoon figures in the shape of Mickey Mouse and Tweetie Bird are blanketed, tied up with rope as if trapped. &ldquo;When I set out to select those objects, I&#39;m often looking for things that are recognizable across different age sets and cultures,&rdquo; explains the 38-year-old, &ldquo;for objects that sort of float in time. I think 50 years from now, they&#39;ll still have the same sort of feeling that they do today.&rdquo;

This is one of the reasons Arsham&rsquo;s fan demographic ranges from young hypebeasts, to the Basel art set, to rappers like Jay-Z and Swiss Beatz. Arsham himself speaks softly and slowly, seemingly shy, the only giveaway of a potential party alter ego are boxes of brightly colored sneakers stowed away on multiple shelves. He&rsquo;s wearing an equally eye-catching pair of kicks as we tour his studio, flashing the occasional side smile as he talks through his favorite things.

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VINTAGE CAMERA COLLECTION

ARSHAM:&nbsp;Here you have these series of cameras: the original M6 that I&#39;ve had for years, a couple of different film cameras, amazing old Japanese cameras that aren&#39;t produced anymore. I mostly shoot travel photos and, even though galleries and museums shoot work when they get it, I usually shoot my own work as well. It&#39;s a different way of looking at it. They&rsquo;re just for my own archive.

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SERIES FOR 3018

ARSHAM:&nbsp;This is a new series of works that will be in the show; I&#39;m showing them for the first time and they&#39;re cast books and magazine. But they&#39;re fictional titles. So I&#39;ve combined things that are either influential on me or that represent some sort of unusual combination.&nbsp;The Year Of Magical Thinking&nbsp;is probably my favorite Joan Didion book. I &nbsp;just think she has a particular way of combining journalism and fiction and, like, this weird mix of two things. And I particularly like that California vibe. I&#39;m just sort of blending these things and selecting things that I may know something about, but they&#39;re fictional titles. So these&#39;ll be in the show...this studio is just always chaotic [laughs].

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PHOTO OF YURI GAGARIN, THE FIRST MAN IN SPACE

ARSHAM:&nbsp;[Here are] a bunch of Future Relic pieces, there&#39;s a photo back there of Yuri Gagarin. as an adventurer and somebody who is looking to push the boundary of what humans can do, he took a major terrifying choice to do that. I find his whole universe&mdash;the cult of personality around him&mdash;interesting. As well as all of technical things related to space travel and NASA.

ARSHAM:&nbsp;Let&#39;s go to the bonsai trees. There&#39;s a couple of different of different bonsai in here, one of which we made a larger version of. It&#39;s part of this garden work at the High Museum in 2015. One is from Florida, &nbsp;one&#39;s about 40 years old, something like that. Right now, in the summer, I sort of let them grow and then they get trimmed back at the end of the summer. here are my bonsai shears. [my co-worker] Austin waters it periodically [laughs]. Austin is definitely the plant expert. I mean there are all different types of trees. One tree is a type of ficus breed that are very resilient&mdash;very hard to kill that unless you over water it.

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PIECE FOR 3018

ARSHAM:&nbsp;This is part&nbsp;of a whole series of pieces that have materials that shift. It&#39;s a shift in material from the original. That impression of rope in the fabric and...that sort of realism that comes about through them. There&#39;s a number of precedence for this kind of concealment of objects, like, works that Man Ray made in the 1930s and 1940s, through to Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping buidlings and things like that. But no fabric or rope in their works.

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JOYA X ARSHAM STUDIO

ARSHAM:&nbsp;This is the scent that I spray into all of the exhibitions. We produced it with Joya. I think scent has the ability to induce memory and&mdash;it&#39;s not something that I really, like, tell people&mdash;but it&#39;s just a scent that&#39;s in the exhibitions. I selected it from a combination of compounds that I went through with Joya.

Studio Visit with Dystopian Artist Daniel Arsham

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