-//-Chad Seidel-//-

-Photography by Chris Jones

Describe my work? Um. It’s changed. It’s changed a lot. I am processing my relationship to reality through defining different parts of myself. Using words allows me to feel. I think that’s what my art is. Allowing words to come out of me for whatever reason they come out of me. They exit my mind in a specific way that’s only possible in that moment. There’re times that if I don’t write then I won’t ever get a certain story. I'll never get that specific pattern back.

When did you start writing?
I started writing after I graduated college in 2013. I'd say I began to have a relationship with this pushing out or the opening of my heart, my soul… I mean I don’t know if it’s just neurons firing. I can’t define that.

There was this time where I was using the moon to see. I feel like I was getting energy from something. Was the moon my muse? I feel like once I started personifying objects and using different symbols, objects, animals to define a part of me that’s hard to define in words. But yeah my relationship to writing started 2013, that deep, hardly explainable, poorly explained thing.

Oh and is still just constantly evolving. My art has become so strange. Like is this art?

Absolutely. Your art is everywhere, Chad. It’s that weird little, tiny two inch computer monitor. It’s whatever those wooden balls are.
You wanna know about those? 

No. It’s that you have a piece of wood roped to your wall. It’s because you have PVC pipe… as a shrine.
Well I was given that. But I flipped it upside down, I guess. Yeah. I took it all over. I took it to Maine. It was in Montreal. 

Who gave it to you? 
This man that believed in pyramid magic. And I was like I don’t believe shit. Cause he was telling me that if I put objects under it then it would charge them. Like if I put water under this PVC pipe pyramid, then it would burn my throat if I drank it and I was like I don’t believe you at all. He was like try it, try it.

Nothing ever burned me.

Where do you think curiosity comes from?
I’m discovering things about our culture, trying to understand what the best way to interact with reality is. There’s a trail. I'm finding a story. I just make up stories for each thing. 

What drives you to create.
I think it’s a mixture between terror and joy. 

What’s terrifying that would compel you to make art?
Imminent death. I've had this thought before, I come back to it in different ways, but it’s basically that whatever I'm doing, whatever my life is, the things you’re pointing out in my bedroom, I'm trying to remind myself of something, I'm leaving clues for myself, but there’s a chance someone will find it and learn something from it.

Do you know what it is that you’re trying to remind yourself of?
Ten thousand different things. Like even the thought to slow down. This is a note to myself. I found that image at a time of a lot of noise, a lot of scattered chatter and that image helped me slow down and be quiet. 

But yeah art. Stories. It’s wild to think about a creature who may be born someday and not even know your story, not know who you are. What do I want to give? I'm just trying to tell multiple stories at once.

I’m patiently waiting. I just step back, a lot. That’s why I put all this shit in my drawer. I was like, I need you to breathe.

And I think that’s the symbol, the image. It’s like the reminder on the outside of this chest of stuff.

Have you ever believed a version of reality and then some external thing or your own exploration totally shifts your reality?
Things have been slowly building for a really long time. That’s kind of the story I was trying to tell with my podcasts, the first major part of this bigger project that I'm doing with the spheres. It started with a project in college. I had a deep, fucked up time.

I wanted to show what it looked like to have an idea, I just got so lost in not being able to, there’s too much to show. It’s almost like you’re trying to mimic reality, you want to make something that expresses to someone like holy shit we’re alive, how the fuck, are we alive? So I was trying to share that, I wanted to package that experience and present it and I got overwhelmed. Somehow I discovered… I was researching all kinds of shit and drawing circles, because of a symbol of infinity or something.

And so my relationship to circles began and then that project ended with like seeing circles inside circles and outside circles, I just started trying to see everything in layers. And that’s just like my first encounter with really having a relationship to circles and spheres.

You start noticing circles more and paying more attention to them.

And now I have a drawer full of fucking different size spheres and I have built objects that hold spheres and that was in 2012, that project. So. That’s five years.

Are you prepared or interested in making any statements about spheres?
At the heart of all the shit I was trying to figure out, there is a mystery that is pulling things in directions. There’s a pull.

Cosmically?
I'm just following a trail. The podcasts- I am just trying to make this weird complex story accessible, and I'm learning as I go you know, I'll draw things, like the death fairy, I'll draw things and then I'll look at them like pffff, where did that? who? I'll look at the picture like I've never seen it, and try to interpret it.

Are you ever afraid of getting lost again?
Um. I'm actually more scared of not being able to.

Lost. I don't know, do you think you’re not lost right now? I feel like I didn’t make my way all the way out. Like I'm still in the forest, I didn’t make it to any clearing. Maybe it’s like daytime now, nighttime is more scary when you’re in the forest, but you’re still in the forest.

What do you aspire to be?
The veil between now and the future is very thick. I can’t see into the future, I just can’t see it. I can’t call it. 

How do you feel about the unknown?
It assumes that there’s something to be found.

Mmm. because of the way we speak about it you mean?
Yeah just the word. it’s a form of mystery I guess.

Do you think that you’re uninhibited?
No, I'm not free because I've asked too many questions. Once you start asking questions you can’t go back you can’t turn around all of a sudden you’re meta as fuck… you’re like asking questions about sand-melting.

Do you feel trapped?
Trapped with questions? No because I read poetry.

Can I read you some? This is out of this book called the Winter Vault, by Ann Michael - ‘In your misery you confuse fate with destiny, fate is dead, it’s death. Destiny is liquid, alive like a bird, there are consequences and there is mystery and sometimes they look the same. All your self-knowledge won’t bring you peace, seek something else. One can never forgive oneself anyway, it takes another person to forgive, and for that you could wait forever.’

While you read it takes you somewhere.

What do you think about devotion?
Oh. that’s what I'm missing. That’s what I'm missing. That’s what I need. God dammit. Yeah I need more of that. Devotion feels like one of the most important things.

Why? 
It just seems like building something, growing something, nourishing a relationship gives it… My mind jumps to the other side though, then there’s the beauty in the spontaneous. All these words interact in different ways. I wrote recently that I could spend my entire life choosing different words and talking about their relationships. I could spend my entire life doing that with two words and I would never run out.