APF Lab presents Touché, a project by Ted Mineo and Colleen Asper.

Colleen Asper and Ted Mineo in Conversation:

Colleen Asper: You came up with the title Touché; what made you think of it?

Ted Mineo: Touché arose as a possible title when I was rooting around for words related to keyboards, which we were both making images of when we began to plan this show—though mine were the musical kind and yours the typing kind. Its use as an acknowledgement of touched-ness seems important.

CA: It does seem important. The papier-mâché letters I have been using so much in my work began as a way to pull texts from a virtual context—an email, a search page—and represent them, with cartoonish exaggeration, as something physical.

TM: In the keyboard paintings, I’m interested in touch as an expressive tool, as a means of controlling sound. My work in this show was built out of a pseudo-synesthetic translation that goes something like this: the taste of a confection I make and call Family Nuts was translated into Jazz Squiggle paintings, which could be misread as paintings inspired by music (or as paintings inspired by paintings that were inspired by music). The Jazz Squiggles then generated the paintings of keyboards, which are designed to seem as if they might be capable of producing the sort of sounds that would inspire a Jazz Squiggle painting.

CA: My work in this show began with an earlier 7’ x 9’ painting of Google’s search page with my name typed into the search bar, which I came to because I was trying to imagine the ‘man without qualities’ as a painting, as a self portrait. The fact that the painting was comprised entirely of text was at first incidental, but the slowness of painting that text made me increasingly sensitive to the physical movements actually involved in using an interface like Google, namely typing. This physical activity is deemed beside the point, the labor involved in writing is always described as cognitive, but the paintings in this show imagine what it would look like if that cognitive labor did take a physical from.

TM: There’s so much more we could go into right now, like why you painted the sides of that one painting blue, or about how Family Nuts are related to Giverny and Van Gogh. Or how Justin Timberlake apparently just bought a place in the building this show is happening in. Did you know I’m five days older than him?

I’m glad we’re BFFs and that I’ll always be able to rattle on about this stuff with you.

Colleen Asper is an artist, writer, and co-founder of Ad Hoc Vox, an ongoing series of discussions and events that address a wide range of issues in contemporary art (adhocvox.org).

Ted Mineo is an artist, and the confectioner and proprietor of Family Nuts. The pair met at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1998, continued on to Yale University, and moved to Brooklyn after graduation, where they both now live and work. Their work has been shown internationally and they have collaborated in many capacities, including a recent curatorial project with Parlour, a nomadic exhibition series based in New York.