The Poetry of Chance

Ben Borden and Zoe Koke discuss their relationship with reference and representation, and their two-person exhibition “Palingenesis.”

By Ben Borden, Zoe KokeApril 26, 2025

• Art & Architecture

ZOE KOKE AND I have been friends since 2009. We both grew up in conservative oil industry cities (Corpus Christi, Texas, and Calgary, Alberta) and ended up in the midst of Montreal’s experimental underground. We’ve worked across many creative channels: music, design, fashion, and film, approaching each of our respective projects with a parallel commitment to experimentation, collaboration, and intuition. We ended up moving to Los Angeles around the same time to attend graduate programs, Zoe at UCLA and me at ArtCenter. Palingenesis, at Gallery 12.26 in Dallas, is our second exhibition together.

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BEN BORDEN: ​​There’s a theme of rebirth and rebuilding in our show at 12.26, which we’ve called Palingenesis, a word with various connotations across Greek mythology, theology, and geology. In geology, palingenesis is a process of extreme pressures and heat that liquifies rock, a process that yields new minerals. In three of your paintings (Aegis I–III), Zoe, you’re referencing macrophotography of geological forms. I’m wondering how you chose those images and how you think about taking something in nature that is, from a human perspective, inherently abstract and then placing it within the canvas as a painted abstraction. I’m curious about that process and, in general, what those images mean to you.

ZOE KOKE: I think a starting place for my answer is that my parents are geologists and I’ve been conditioned to observe small details in nature since childhood, which is probably why I’m drawn to these specific abstract moments to explore in my art. Over the last few years, I’ve been drawn to the subject of volcanoes because of how they enact immense change in the landscape, calling for deep regeneration in ecosystems, as well as how the aftermath of a volcanic eruption can parallel the outcome of a natural disaster. Volcanoes are incredibly bodily and gothic and to me are a poetic and accessible metaphor to meaningfully reflect on time, the environment, and change.

The paintings I made for the show reference an abstracted geological space—including Kýklos (which means “cycle” in Greek), a zoomed-out landscape painting of the volcanic plain at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park on the Island of Hawaiʻi. The park spans roughly 554 square miles. The Aegis I–III paintings reference the patterning of agates specifically; agates are banded quartz stones that form in the cavities of volcanoes from immense pressure. In a way, they are documents of volcanic activity and have a ubiquitous feeling, as well as unique coloration, where color dissolves and blends between layers of rock. In the spring, I revisited Hawaiʻi to consider the volcanic plain there, where ongoing eruptions of two of the most active volcanoes on the island (and in the world), Kīlauea and Mauna Loa, characterize the landscape and have long shaped the culture there. Interestingly, while I was finishing work for our show, eruptions started up again. It’s an incredibly humbling place. In 2018, I saw lava flowing into the ocean there at night, which remains to be one of the most intense visual experiences of my life. According to current scientific understanding, without volcanic activity and the presence of gases they release, such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulfur, no life on earth would exist, which I find incredibly profound.

In our show, palingenesis also refers to the way your work flourishes. You have created a paint substrate from algae that you adhere to glass, which develops over long stretches of time to create fields of color that you at times backlight. Can you talk about your interest in geology and how that presents in your work?

Geology operates on such a different timescale, millions of years versus a human experience of time. There’s a similar parallel with the materials I work with. I might leave a piece alone for weeks or even months, not looking at it. When I return to it, it has changed and created new colors and forms. The rate of change isn’t something you can clock with the human eye, though. Sometimes I don’t even realize something has changed unless I look back at old photos. It forces me to work with time differently. The work isn’t about creating a static image; it’s more about staging an event. I think about them as moments or even performances, in the sense that the process continues even after I gather it into a presentable form. One of the pieces in the show has been gestating since 2021 and will continue to change.

I definitely relate to the idea of an artwork functioning as a performance, and I’ve always been fascinated by how you set up the conditions for your work to evolve. I’m also curious about the spiritual aspect of your work. We’ve talked about Sigmar Polke’s stained glass project at the Grossmünster church in Zurich—how he used slices of agate to make the incredible windows. Across many religions, agates were considered protective stones, which inspired my naming my agate paintings Aegis, which means protection, referencing Athena’s goatskin shield. I feel like ancient Greece is constantly surfacing in my work, and I see something happening similarly in yours where there’s a strong theological leaning in addition to the conditions of your process. Can you elaborate on this and your interest in stained glass and making forms that could easily adorn the interior of a spiritual space?

A large part of my interest in stained glass comes from those windows. I hadn’t really been thinking about light and translucency in my work until I read Paul Chan’s essay about Polke’s windows. In that essay, Chan talks about how they tell the story of Genesis not through representation or reproduction but through embodiment; those thin slices of agate are themselves a process of geological genesis. That idea of material embodiment and presentation of nature in an unmediated form is reflected in the works (untitled window mnv, mvn, and nmv): chemical reactions suspended in thin layers of bioplastic illuminated by a light panel.

There’s a theological discomfort with images in the Abrahamic faiths, the most extreme form being iconoclasm. Even within that prohibition, certain images are permitted and celebrated because they are considered to be miraculous and made without human hands. Many of these images are said to have been generated by spontaneous contact with fluids—water, blood, and sweat. Sometimes residue from these images transfers onto other surfaces through contact, virally creating more miraculous images. The Shroud of Turin’s classification as a miraculous image is interesting to me because it has more to do with the then-new technology of photography than the authenticity of the shroud. The shroud was and is still widely understood to be a hoax, but when it was photographed and the film was developed in a chemical bath, a face emerged from the negative, a reenactment of the resurrection in chemical form. I like to think that the classification of “miraculous” is extended in this case to that action of revelation, not the shroud itself; it’s less an image and more a performance.

What links your photography, object-making, and painting? I’m thinking particularly of a photo of yours of a white swan on a lake at night with a glowing red eye. There’s an unsettling quality to that image, which of course has a lot to do with the moodiness of the subject but also the way the camera flash simultaneously disrupts and reveals.

There’s definitely a lot that I leave up to the poetry of chance in my process, which is how I would consider that glowing eye, or even the need to work in different mediums to begin with. I’m fairly against the myth of genius in art, or notions of authorship and celebrity. I really think of my role as an artist as the role of a conduit. I don’t want to overdefine what I’m doing, but one major link between mediums is landscape as a thematic starting place—how we perceive it and interact with it, and how power moves through it. I’m interested in our disconnect from nature and our bodies in the current geopolitical climate, how the physical performance of making art becomes a grounding ritual. I think another big connection between all the mediums in my work is that I resist anything feeling too machined, designed, or orderly. I think a clumsy humanness needs to be present.

At the same time, I try to work in different forms continuously because I want to feel alien to my work—it has its own systems without me. In my photographs, there’s usually something ominous happening. With that swan photographed alone in the inky night on the lake, for example, there’s a sense of voyeurism, like the viewer is witnessing something with a sense of risk or warning. At the same time, the photo isn’t perfect: you see the mark of the maker in the image. That image led to a lot of research on the violent Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, initiated by a conversation I had with my friend Aryen Hoekstra years ago, who runs the gallery Franz Kaka in Toronto. That photo and story form an important place marker in my work and part of this questioning of domination in the landscape and what it means to be making images of the landscape. Overall, a certain tension threads through all of my work around our growing detachment from physical space, each other, and our bodies—history too. I’m worried about that. My sculptures are often direct 1:1 metal castings of ephemera in nature, mixed with found objects, again echoing human history. Apart from objects, photos, and paintings, I also make films that explore disorienting human relationships. Painting responds to ideas about landscape and disconnect perhaps the most abstractly, where the image sometimes disintegrates, explodes, or dissolves, often suggesting a fading away or the disappearance of the landscape. In the case of this show, though, nature mostly swells in the frame of the painting, almost spilling out urgently. I want the processes to shift and evolve by themselves in my work; the ideas need to find their format.

A connection between our work is that we make abstractions that are also defined by nature as a subject. How do you consider landscape in your work?

I think about a landscape less as a separation line between sky and earth or a vista than as something that’s shifting and accumulating. Like a tunnel that moves forward and backward in time through a fixed point, all the layers of experience that have existed in a single place. Just as a landscape holds evidence of geological time, erosion, or human intervention, my pieces hold on to their own history. Even when I decide to “fix” something into a static form, it’s really just a pause in an ongoing process rather than a definitive end. Landscape is a framework for thinking about time and the way things leave traces of themselves even as they disappear.

That definition of landscape makes me think of the sense of dissolution or fading away in some of your paintings, how there’s this unstable focus on a foreground. How do you see your approach to landscape evolving across different mediums?

It’s hard to fully know though I think the different mediums create different levels of focus for me to physically process a specific mood an artwork is calling for. They are different physical choreographies too, so it’s intuitive. Paintings fall into conversation with the uncertainty we are facing, maybe the most obviously, because the way they are made is pretty unhinged and is very much physical and durational. In content, they often echo a distance from or proximity to nature, but overall a certain disorientation of the classic renderings of nature.

A huge part of my process is about resisting control, and moving away from a controlled system of representation, or even controlled hierarchical social systems in my life, even from a style in my own work, which I know inevitably exists. It keeps me curious and vulnerable. I never want my work or approach to what I’m doing to be too tightly woven, largely because I think we are living under great social control currently and are always navigating that. I would love for my works to function as containers for a body to experience something outside of that, and something outside digital space and perfected branded realities as much as possible. I subconsciously push to have everything I make feel different; it feels like it’s part of the job to not make the same offering twice.

Photography for me is probably the most direct as far as legible social markers go. There’s a known familiarity in my photos. I’ve photographed iconic, familiar cultural monuments and landscapes—the Grand Canyon shrouded in fog, Las Vegas as a dilapidated site of swirling capital, the Catacombs in Paris, the ruins at the birthplace of Rome—or environmental distress in the landscape, like a red tide in Santa Monica. In my photos, I want human history to register. Overall, I think there is a sense of longing present in all my work that relates to our disembodied sense of reality, how our sense of reality is fragmenting, our senses fraying. I’m curious about how we can ground ourselves when we are living through new and manipulated forms of perception and when we are facing so much change.

How would you describe your relationship to making the images and objects you make?

I’m still figuring out my relationship with the images I create and maybe images in general. I think a lot about how images are increasingly generated and not captured. Working with a material that has its own logic, a logic that feels partially obscured from me, is a way for me to form a perspective on what I think is a rapidly evolving change in the way we understand images and sight. It’s a dialogue with something that moves independently of me. It’s like really slow painting: I make a gesture and won’t see the result for months or even years. I set things in motion and can mediate and steer them, but a lot of it involves knowing when not to intervene.

I’m curious—when you first started making your work, what was your thought process? What was your intention with that first piece?

When I first started, I was interested in control and infrastructure. I realized that the chemical reaction that produces Prussian blue pigment is also related to metal corrosion. I did research on the electrical systems used to prevent corrosion on the metal hulls of large oceangoing ships and I reproduced a very, very scaled-down version of one of those systems as a way to stabilize a reaction into a static image. As long as the reaction was connected to a power source, it wouldn’t continue, it would stay in this controlled state; when it was unplugged, the reaction would continue.

I unplugged that work, put it in a closet, and forgot about it for a year. When I finally looked at it again, it was beautiful and totally different. It had continued evolving despite my attempts to contain it. I became obsessed with this idea of letting things flourish. The work was operating on its own, independent of my intentions. Instead of imposing control, I started thinking about how I could work with the reactions, how I could facilitate them.

I love this intervention of ship maintenance in that process and then the knowledge to abandon that investment when something else happened to interest you more. This is so important for me too, to know when to release an expectation I had for an artwork. In terms of this investigation of control, for me, painting specifically doesn’t function so differently except that it’s minimal in its materiality—it’s a surface and a series of substances, the brush as mediator with the painter. Largely, it’s an exploration between the idea that moves me to try to render something and accepting what transpires. Something I personally love about painting is its clunky athletic nature—the strange choreography of space, moving things around, and the transference of psychic energy from the artist and the environment. It’s this act of pressing your body against a surface repeatedly—to create a document, a tactile transmission.

The hardest part for me with art is all the history you are contending with, but then I remember how Western art history as a construct is inherently fraught and exclusive, and that gives me some room. Truthfully, I’ve just always needed to paint since I was very small, and I almost consider it like a dance practice or something. If it wasn’t painting, I was always making some sort of document, story, or performance. For me, painting involves a kind of repetition or working through an idea with this instrument on a cloth surface; it feels almost like the notion of playing a theremin or something. There’s a lot of intensity to it at times. My brushstrokes aren’t tied to a direct representation of an image. Often, there’s a gritty image of nature as a reference point, but at the same time, I’m searching for something that unfolds. So when I talk about mediating information, I mean what moves through me, my lived experiences, my relationships with people, what I’m reading, my politics, my feelings—this is all part of the transmission of the painting and arguably any artwork. I think a lot about my responsibility in procuring images and the politics of my body within my work and how my actions in life, my attitudes, and my thinking affect my work. I’m also interested in how our political climate asks us to resist our intuition and how the unknown hasn’t been historically trusted, which draws me to this really intuitive way of making art. With the institutionalism of art, there has been a lot of determinism of what an art practice is, but historically, art-making has been a ritual of survival.

That makes sense. Whether consciously or not, it’s unavoidable that you’re imparting yourself into the work.

Yeah, I think so. At the same time, I feel that when my painting or any of my art is most successful, I am the most present, which I would argue is when I stop being “myself” and am outside of the situation and the uncertainty of the process can unfold on its own. At the same time, I suppose, the process itself is a record of the artist’s presence.

I really like the way you describe painting as a choreography of space—it makes me think about how much of the process is about movement and repetition. Painting holds the imprint of the body, of gestures layered over time.

I hear what you’re saying about mediation, not just in terms of representation but also as a way of channeling experience into form. It’s always a negotiation between intention and intuition.

You mentioned, outside this conversation, needing a daily meditation practice as a way to process and filter what enters the studio. It’s easy to carry the weight of everything—politics, personal experiences, the sheer volume of information we take in daily—into the work, sometimes without realizing it. I think that balance, knowing how much to let in and how much to protect, is something a lot of artists wrestle with. How do you manage that?

Yes, for sure. As I get older, I’ve been thinking a lot about the health and limits of my body and mind. I’m also thinking more about ancestry, which is little known on one side of my family, and how that continues to permeate my experiences. Life is inherently dramatic. I don’t think I need to avoid bringing all the subjectivity of my life into my work, but I do think meditation can bring me into a state of acceptance with myself, with my body, which can help clear my mind for other surprising and collective information to come in. In a way, meditation helps move information out so that you can be more porous and receptive to feelings, ideas, and impulses that you might otherwise miss or be distracted from. In a sense, anything that can deliver you the capacity to remember your inner nature, your connection with all things—outside of social control and daily stresses—feels useful, not just for general well-being but also for a creative process. EMDR, a psychological process using hand buzzers to mitigate unprocessed trauma across the axis of the body, is also something that has really helped me recalibrate so that my past experiences and anxieties aren’t at the forefront of my psyche. Making and sharing one’s art is a fragile job on a personal level, but more so in that the time we are living in is really unsettling and unpredictable. Thus it feels important for me to continue to build a deep sense of safety in myself to make room for alchemy. Over time, as the process of making is starting to encompass more of my life, I believe evolving personally is central to making meaningful work.

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Featured image: Zoe Koke. Aegis I–III in Palingenesis installation view. 2025. Oil and acrylic on canvas. Photo by 12.26 Gallery.