Service Conversations

JAMES WARREN WITH CHRIS TAYLOR
Framing, Return, and Displacement

Thursday, April 23, 2026, 12:03 PM, Zoom • 52min

JAMES WARREN (From his studio in Brooklyn): My mindset coming into this –– there could be a few useful context pieces for you, Chris, especially since you weren’t there to see the show entirely in person. One is that Service is Seoyoung’s curatorial project ^[1], and when they did the last exhibition –– I guess I’m the second person to show there, right, Seoyoung? –– the goal with this space was to treat it as something of a residency. The previous artist was in the space for three weeks making work before the show. Given our time period, and also that I have a studio in New York, we modified that. I had about a week where I made something site-specific to the space. That’s the installation, the photo displacement piece in the back. It was a response to the space, made in the days just before the show. That’s the first piece of context I wanted to give.

The other piece of context is that I really envisioned this conversation as another version of the one-on-one meetings we had, which were so helpful. And while you didn't see the show in person, I was really adamant about speaking with you because one of the things I was focusing on — between the time I got back from Land Arts ^[2] and the time I was making new work for this show — was Ann Reynolds' The Problem of Return. ^[3] There was a lot of thinking about repetition and return, about moving away and now being in this place. And you are in a unique position, having seen me work and experience the places that now show up in the paintings and photographs. That seemed like something special — something that might offer more insight to a public that will eventually have access to the publication Seoyoung is making. That was my whole thought process, and I hope it's a good starting point for this conversation.

CHRIS TALYOR (from his office at Texas Tech University, Huckabee College of Architecture): I think that's a great starting point. One of the things that is exciting to me about your work — in applying to participate in Land Arts — is your relationship to both close observation through the work, and the literal frames and apparati of looking, of making pictures. It's a picture of a place, of a landscape, of a situation, and the picture is in the picture. There's a lot of potential to unpack relative to return and repetition, à la Ann Reynolds. And I think what's baked into the work — and what I find so exciting here — is that you had this field experience that stretched the possibility of how to work. Leaving the studio, being itinerant, camping, a different palette of materials. It was different on many levels. And so you went and experimented. I kept waiting: okay, he's just doing this, and he's going to start painting soon. Because you're a painter. At one point I was even joking about it — when is the painting going to start? And then I realized that wasn't a productive joke, and I should back off. Let you do what you're doing.
And then when we were back on campus and you were in the studio, I thought: okay, now it's going to happen. He's going to return to painting. And your response was, no, there's something in these photographs I need to figure out by spending time in them. I really appreciated that you took on the potential of the field program as a chance to stretch ways of making, and also possibilities of what the work can be. If I think back on the core interest in your work — close observation, deep looking, where the picture is in the picture — the crop is there, yet the crop is part of many crops. The frame is always in the frame.
To now see the documentation of the work in this show — to me, it's both a return back to the studio, a return to ways of making that you have in the trajectory of your work. And, it's also something more. The return is in method, and also in the photo objects — I don't know what you're calling them — and the fact that they exist in this in-between space. The wooden stand is part of the work; it's not just an easel holding up a picture. And the degree to which they're anthropomorphic — they stand and look at you as you stand and look at them. To have a picture look back at you is a whole different thing.
Part of what's interesting about the return is this question of moving back. Yet there is a larger arc. Your return is an engine within, the bigger project is about the construction — as well as the dematerialization — of the frame. The frame is both present and also a really slippery thing. One of the things we talked about, in working up the photographs — both in editing them as a selection, and in how you composed what's inside the frame — was how you held steady the classical subject in the photograph, while the land became legible as what changed. You serialized them, and the real difference became the land itself — the same object at the same site, yet turned ninety degrees, or seven hours later with totally different light. That transformation of observation is really powerful.

JW: The word that's coming to mind is the margins. That's kind of where the meaning is, or something like that.

CT: Well — there is no margin in your work. The figure and the ground — one of the titles is Figure-ground — in the classical sense gets flipped, or both are charged. You're giving agency to the frame. The space between the subject and the frame, which we might think of as a margin — none of that is less important. All of it is equally important. In the picture of The Tap,^[4] you kept the electrical socket that's just sitting there. That could easily have been edited out of a painting. But it stayed.

James Warren, Figure-ground, 2025, Oil on canvas over panel, 11 x 14 inches

JW: This is one of the things that touches on my insecurities but is also one of the questions I really wanted to see what would happen with when I returned to painting. You're one of the few people — maybe the only person — who would look at these things and say, I know that's ‘School No. 6’ I know that's The Tap.^[5] And there was a difficult thing for me there. I responded really heavily to things like The Tap, which is an artwork by M-12 Studio,^[6] and to School No. 6 by Ilya Kabakov.^[7] But it became obvious when I was returning that the site couldn't really be those things anymore. The site had to be the photograph. I was reading something about Walter De Maria — the idea that the photograph is the site.^[8] That's kind of how I had to think about it.

And so ninety-nine percent of people don't know what they're looking at. I had to deal with that. I kept asking myself: why am I painting these things? I can paint anything. There was insecurity there. But ultimately it was like — the meaning doesn't come from people understanding what it is. The meaning comes from people reconciling with it. Hopefully the painting conveys this idea that someone has previously stood here at this site and tried to make sense of it before me or the viewer. I don't know if it does. There are a lot of questions about form and content, and why painting at all. The painting is different from the photograph, and that was one of the generative things I was most interested in — how can it go one step further?

James Warren, School No. 6 (Kabakov), 2026, Oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches

James Warren, The Tap (M12 Studio), 2026, Oil on canvas, 15 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches

CT: Those two examples — Kabakov and M-12 — there's a lot to unpack with both of them. With The Tap picture, it took me a little longer. When I first looked at it, I noticed the electrical plug and thought, oh, cool. And then there's Eric's computer, and nobody other than the people in that room knows what's on that screen. The image on the monitor isn't something easily legible — it's more of a pattern. Yet the fact that the computer is there at all — it's a portal to another world, a frame within a frame. And then I noticed, to the left side, this rectangular shift in color and tone. For a moment I thought, it's sunlight coming in through a door. But then on the other side there's a tree branch, and another scene bleeding in through the patina of the rusty corrugated metal. At that point it destabilized me, even though I know that room very well.
The idea that it's more than just a reflection on an experience that resonated with you — the space between you and the work doesn't give you something singular or one-dimensional. It's not transactional, the question is not: did you get it? It's more about bringing a total experience together.
Schoolhouse Six by Kabakov — if we think about it as a painting rather than as an installation, it's so emblematic of everything you're working with. Frames inside frames inside frames. The building is a frame. The landscape around it is a frame. Then we move into the cases, and inside those are pictures that have pictures in them, notes, dirt, the patina of time. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds. Each object drills down into a space. As a viewer you're thrown into that ocean and bouncing around. I've been in there with people who say, this is just a bunch of junk, that they don't get it. They can't grab onto it experientially or conceptually — they're trying to take it in literally. I argue that for them it fails, not because the work fails, but because they failed to come to it with curiosity and the ability to observe. And to think about that as a diagram for how your work operates — you're creating conditions where people can come in at different points of engagement and sense complexity, sense the presence of multitudes of worlds.

James Warren, The Correlator (Very Large Array), 2026, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

CT: And to bounce to the Correlator picture^[9] — the margin is the landscape, the reflection and refraction in the photograph. The margin is actually bouncing us toward something out there that's bigger than the frame. And in the center, we're looking at a machine that is sensing light years out from Earth. So that's happening optically, conceptually — and what that picture is trafficking in is some seriously deep time.

JW: That one was somewhat of a catalyst for that whole train of thought, which I think you just laid out well. The experience of finding that photograph taped to the wall — not getting to look into the Correlator room itself, but getting to look at a terrible printout of it.

CT: Didn't you press your face against the glass?

JW: I did, but there are curtains — those plastic blinds that turn. So it was somewhat obscured.

CT: Sometimes when it's not an open house and there's no picture there, I've done that — pressing a face to the glass — and there's a human on the other side, at a terminal, trying not to notice. Like, whoa, there's a human inside this machine. It seems the building is the machine, yet when you get a glimmer, a peekaboo, it's like — oh, there are other machines in there, and one of them is a human.

JW: It was definitely a highlight for me. I had a lot of anxieties about the installation in the back room, but it kind of felt like the Correlator room — I put all this material in there. I went to Walgreens and printed out a bunch of them. Source material. Let's make a little correlator and put it in this back room. I was reading The Problem of Return at the time, and thinking about Robert Smithson's displacements.^[10] And the back room itself is this weird space.

CT: Bringing displacement into this is another really productive vector. A picture is both a memory of a situation — a landscape, a person, an event — and it's containing, bringing things close, but also displacing. It reminds me of an early Land Arts participant who, after the first journey, decided they had spent too much time experiencing everything through the lens and not directly. So they left the camera at home and brought an Etch A Sketch. If they wanted to remember something, they drew it on the Etch A Sketch. They were very slow drawings — not seventy-five pictures within minutes of arriving somewhere. It forced them to spend time looking and observing, and then deciding what to record. And the funny part was that to remember the drawings, they had to borrow someone's camera to take a photograph of the sketch. So there were photographs of drawings. It goes a little crazy. But it's also one way to get around the no-photographs policy at The Lightning Field.^[11] It's a drawing.

JW: That sounds kind of like the polar opposite of the experience we had at the Nevada Department of Transportation test strip — that stretch of road where they test road paint.^[12] The Etch A Sketch is about getting away from the photograph in a way that's about looking. But what I was so enamored with at that site was that all thirteen of us took the same photograph of it. And I imagined — because you run an archive for all the past years — there must be two hundred-plus photos of the same exact thing. What kind of looking does that allow, when you have this mass repetition of one subject? Maybe I'm not tying them together perfectly, but for me they feel like two opposite ways to look deeply at something.

CT: Whether the depth is temporal — one person's visit — or sustained across many years and many people. One can argue it's a little silly that I keep bringing people to the same places year after year. We don't go to that strip painting every year, yet over time it's become part of the sustained looking. And nobody has ever walked up to it and said, I don't get it. Everybody's been like, that's strange, that's interesting. And that's part of what we're drawn to in the sites we visit — this wide spectrum, where some things have the institutional stamp and some things don't. When I look at those stripes now, and maybe I'm thinking about this because of your tutorial on making a ground^[13], I wonder if it's where they're cleaning their nozzles — clearing lines at the end of the day. Working the material out of their brush, which is a truck with a nozzle on it.

JW: I like that. I probably just made up the paint-testing theory when I tell people about it. That was just my interpretation. Which is great.

CT: I'm making it up too. Yet now with this thought — if it is that, you'd expect to see places where it gets mushy, where it bleeds out. And I don't think I've ever seen that. The thing to do would be to stop and talk to someone who works in one of those trucks and ask what they use it for.

JW: Maybe that's how I hope people approach the work. There’s the person to talk to when they look at a painting of a photograph taped to a window and ask, what am I looking at here? The right way to find out is to talk to me. But I hope the painting has a life when it's not always being explained by me. The guessing is part of it.

James Warren, Photo Archive Installation (Blue), 2026, DNP photo prints, polar, pine, birch ply, blue tape

CT: That's a really important point. While it's a treat to be in the room with you and have that conversation, these works operate on their own. There are the literal facts — what is a correlator, what is it doing — then there's the larger work, which is largely about looking, about observation, about how to contextualize an experience and bring it into frame. That's what museums are. That's what galleries are. That's what books are. They're about making an idea transportable, conveyable. The reason archival-ness in the history of art matters is the durability of ideas we want to hold onto. These are pictures about the project of making pictures. And that's not disposable meta. It's a deep use of placing worlds inside worlds.

The photo archive installation is sitting unlike the other works. The paintings — Goblin Valley, UT, for instance — are a manifestation of a thing. There's an out there, and your response to out there was to make a friend, to look at that friend very precisely, and bring it back. Animate it with the stand. The photo archive, by contrast — and I haven't seen it in person, so I'm projecting — appears to be an atomized version of what was catching your eye out in the field, brought back into this space and positioned in a way that can not be essentialized into a single picture. We're not moving through them in a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. You've constructed a constellation — a network of visual material. And the armature you built to hold it is also part of the story. The framing that allows us to encounter the work amid the gas meters and electric meters, which are their own forms of framing how we exist in contemporary culture — that fusing is charged in a productive way.

James Warren, Photo Archive Installation (Blue), 2026, DNP photo prints, polar, pine, birch ply, blue tape

Installation View, James Warren: The Half-life of a Sign, Courtesy of Site Service

There was one installation view — the last one, number twenty-two (image above) — that I quite like. In it we have all three conditions: the photo totem object; the picture inside of the picture inside of the picture of Fat Man;^[14] and in the distance, the back room. I can even see you making a painting of that photograph — this nested image that has everything in it. It would track, and it could continue for a long time. Pictures of the pictures you're making, inside the pictures you're making, receding inward until they're no longer legible. This continuum of observation — recorded photographically, through drawing, through painting, through image making. And at its core, each of these armatures, each of these framing techniques, is about constructing relationships between us as viewers and these subjects. The frame, the process of framing, the process of looking — for me those are as much a subject in the work as anything inside the pictures. And that's really exciting.

JW: And that's why I think, at least in my experience interacting with people looking at the work, the Fat Man piece was maybe the least successful — because the subject was too recognizable. People kind of already knew what it was, and so they stopped asking. Which is useful to understand. It might have been too recognizable. And depressing.

CT: And depressing. To be clear, what's depressing is the history of atomic weaponry — not you for engaging with it. But this opens up something else to talk about — abstraction. These are not abstract works, but one might say the process that allows them to exist is not entirely literal. There's a spectrum in the history of painting between abstraction and figuration, including the movement we see presently away from abstraction and back toward figuration.A return we might say. I see you participating in that conversation, in a very precise way. Even the standing photographs, thought of anthropomorphically, start to play into figuration — yet not in a way that turns them into a human body.

James Warren, Facsimile (Wendover Airfield Museum), 2026, Watercolor on polypropylene mounted to panel, 14 x 11 inches

JW: It's a good question, especially thinking forward. They are representational, but when you work from a photograph, you're actually translating a two-dimensional space. You're not painting from life, where you're considering actual space and how both eyes work in relation to things. You're looking at something that doesn't change. It's kind of like you're painting a flat thing, which becomes really abstract in the way you think about layering paint onto a canvas. The other thought is that for this recent body of work, the translation from photograph to painting was pretty direct. There wasn't much shift in perspective — basically whatever my hand and the limitations of layering paint would cause to be different. Which makes me ask: what else can paint do to further these ideas? Does abstraction become part of the answer? It's an open-ended question.

CT: There's content in the form and form in the content. Painting from a photograph — while we can find examples of photographs that contain depth, operationally they have no depth. The depth is within the picture, but unlike a still life in the studio that you can move around, you can't interrogate that depth by shifting your point of view. That initial flattening — and there may sometimes be multiple flattenings — is operative. It's significant.
What does it mean to further flatten something that's already flat? When that's in juxtaposition with objects that are not flat, things start to become charged. With the Fat Man image, outside of its content — which is an atomic bomb — it's a flattened photograph in front of a dimensional object that has itself been made flat again by the photograph that's the source for the painting. That repetition of flattening is curious to me.

JW: It's maybe just an accessibility thing — this is what I'm able to take away from a place. The easiest thing to carry. But it definitely relates to how most of the places we visited are experienced. All of these canonical land art works, for example, we had all seen through photographs before experiencing them in person. So those ideas are in it.

CT: Matt Coolidge has spoken very eloquently about Nancy Holt — not just Sun Tunnels,^[15] but the work in general, as being about framing, about viewing, about creating precise moments of view. Once you have that experience, once that recognition happens, your ability to observe things outside of those viewing devices is enriched. She created moments to look outward — at landscapes or urban situations — with increased rigor or specificity. There was a physics and a geometry that was enacted. Another reference can be Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect ^[16] — a shape carved into a structure, yet really about the cone of vision beyond the cut.

Mapping that into the conversation about your work — yes, the photo is the easiest thing to take away. Then what do you do with it? There are many examples of people making the ephemeral more permanent — Richard Prince's Instagram paintings, for instance.^[17] A screen grab of something completely ephemeral, given cultural gravity by becoming a large-scale painting. Yet to me, it's more about what you're doing with the photographs. Unlike other examples of painting from ephemeral sources, the photograph for you — as this initial flattening, or sometimes multiple flattenings — is genuinely operative and significant.
Another way Coolidge talks about the Center for Land Use Interpretation ^[18] is through a photograph: a marker sitting on the ground in the desert, a person, and a person with a camera. The way that gets unpacked — the photograph on the screen that we're seeing, and me in the back of the room taking a picture of our group relative to the photo — is an example of nested forms of interpretation. And for the Center to define their mission as being part of that process — it's a continuum. It's not about being the first or the last, or the one who does it the most. It's about understanding that you're part of an ecosystem of interpretation and plugging into conversations. If we use ecology as an operative metaphor — to be the only creature, the lion with nothing else around, you're not the lion for very long. You need all the other creatures, all the other forms of life. This interpretive ecology — of observation, examination, image construction — is another piece at the core.
To fold that back around to Service and what it means to have an exhibition that is also a residency — to think about this space as a literal vehicle for you to think through and make work in situ, and then allow a public to enter that by experiencing the work and its documentation. The fact that we're having this conversation, that it's going to exist in other forms — online, in print — that's all about these webs of interaction. It animates the work. The better word is that it feeds it. It provides sustenance, rather than just motion. This is the opposite of a Survival Research Laboratory project making a dead rabbit walk backwards. This is much more progenitive — making other possibilities forward. Whether people look at your work and know the answer, or whether they look at it and ask, why is there a picture in this picture of the same picture, what the hell — the bigger takeaway is: I'm inside of a thing that's a thing I'm part of. I'm a piece of my world looking at my world. And, I'm also the maker of that world.

Notes:
1 Service is a physical venue and artist incubation platform located in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan, New York. It operates as part of Nine, a collective of four organizations. Service is a sister project to Site, a nomadic curatorial initiative. Both are founded and directed by Seoyoung Kim.
2 Land Arts of the American West is a studio-based field program directed by Chris Taylor at Texas Tech University. The program takes students and visiting artists on extended journeys through the American landscape, visiting land art sites, industrial and infrastructure projects, and ecologically significant terrain. It emphasizes itinerant, site-responsive, and process-based inquiry.
3 Ann Reynolds, The Problem of Return in Land Arts of the American West (University of Texas Press, 2009) pp. 122-129. The text is concerned with questions of repetition, return, and displacement — themes Warren cites as central to the development of this body of work.
4 The Tap is an artwork by M-12 Studio, a collaborative practice based in Colorado. Warren first encountered the work during the Land Arts program. https://www.m12studio.org/the-tap/
5 Schoolhouse Six is an installation by the Russian Conceptualist artist Ilya Kabakov, part of his ongoing body of installations exploring Soviet memory, institutional space, and the patina of abandoned objects at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas..
6 M-12 Studio is a collaborative artist group founded by Richard Saxton and others, producing large-scale installations and interventions in landscape and agricultural contexts primarily in the American West. https://www.m12studio.org/about-m12-studio/
7 See note 5.
8 Warren references a reading in which Walter De Maria articulates the photograph as the site of the work — a position that proved decisive in Warren's return to the studio and his decision to treat his own Land Arts photographs as primary material rather than documentation.
9 The Correlator is a structure associated with the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope facility in New Mexico, visited during the Land Arts program. Warren photographed a printout of an image of the Correlator room — taped to a wall near the facility — rather than the room itself, which was inaccessible behind tinted glass. The image becomes the basis for one of the works in this exhibition.
10 Robert Smithson developed the concept of displacement across several essays and works, most notably in his "Nonsites" — works that displaced material and photographic documents from sites in the landscape into the gallery. Warren's installation of printed photographs in the back room (the "meter room" at Nine) references this logic of displacement from site to interior space.
11 Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977) is a land art work located in a remote area of New Mexico, consisting of 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid across one mile by one kilometer of high desert. The work is administered by the Dia Art Foundation, which enforces a strict no-photography policy for visitors.
12 A stretch of Nevada highway maintained by the state, where road marking paint is tested on asphalt. The Land Arts program stops here periodically. The site is undistinguished in any conventional sense, yet consistently prompts extended looking from participants.
13 James Warren, "Molding Paste Painting Ground," Art Forearm, April 2, 2026. Published as part of Art Forearm's Toolbox series — a practical, material-oriented guide for artists — the piece outlines Warren's process for preparing a molding paste painting ground: a smooth, non-absorbent surface on which paint behaves with the translucency of watercolor. Taylor's aside connects the labor of ground preparation to the highway strip, reading the painted asphalt as a surface conditioned by the same logic — material worked out, layer by layer, before anything else can begin. https://www.artforearm.com/p/molding-paste-painting-ground
14 Fat Man refers to the second atomic bomb dropped by the United States, on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Warren's painting Facsimile (Wendover Airfield Museum), 2026, depicts a photograph of a replica or documentation of Fat Man, itself photographed in situ at a site visited during Land Arts.
15 Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Great Basin Desert, Utah. Four large concrete tunnels aligned with the sunrise and sunset on the solstices, with holes drilled in the upper surface to cast patterns of light corresponding to star constellations. A foundational work in American land art.
16 Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect (1975). A site-specific intervention in two adjoining seventeenth-century townhouses in Paris, in which Matta-Clark cut a large conical opening through multiple floors, framing a specific cone of vision toward the then-under-construction Centre Georges Pompidou.
17 Richard Prince is an American appropriation artist known, among other bodies of work, for his "New Portraits" series (2014–15), in which he enlarged and printed screenshots of other users' Instagram posts as large-scale inkjet paintings, raising significant questions about authorship, appropriation, and the cultural economy of social media images.
18 The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a research organization based in Los Angeles, founded by Matthew Coolidge, dedicated to the study and interpretation of how land in the United States is utilized. Through exhibitions, publications, tours, and a large archive of photographs and research, CLUI occupies a unique position between art, geography, and institutional critique.

James Warren (b. 1999) lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 and has exhibited in New York, Brooklyn, and Providence, RI. In 2025, he was a participant in the Land Arts of the American West program at Texas Tech University, researching and making in the American Southwest. Working primarily with painting, drawing, and photography, his work is concerned with dialectical landscapes—where natural forces and human intervention intersect. He is interested in the possibility of image-making as something which can not only depict the built environment, but also influence, construct, and become a part of it.

Chris Taylor was born in Germany, raised in waters of Southwest Florida, lives in arid American Southwest. An architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Huckabee College of Architecture, Taylor is deeply committed to the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of the planet. The Terminal Lake Exploration Platform, created with support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, continues to facilitate visual and performative research within under-examine basins and internal aquatic fringes. Taylor studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

James Warren: The Half-life of a Sign
April 26 - May 10, 2026
Nine, 9 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002