@ Photography Roberto Ruiz
Shape-shifting
In dialogue with Sequoia Scavullo
FVTVRIST Magazine // 13 March 2026
Interview by Elina P.
@ Photography Roberto Ruiz
@ Photography Roberto Ruiz
Could you introduce yourself and what is essential when we speak about your practice?
I’m from Baltimore, Maryland. I grew up with my mother, who is a shiatsu practitioner and acupuncturist. She was very creative when she was young, and she’s also very social. I see many similarities between artists and healers: both require observation, intuition, and an understanding that there is never one fixed solution: two people can have the same illness, but the treatment cannot be identical. I grew up around that kind of creative thinking.
That fluidity, this idea of shape-shifting, of wearing many cloaks, is strongly present in my practice. The work is about a sensory relationship to the world, about energies, systems of dominance, and exchanges of power.
I am also fascinated by the idea of flatness and our relationship to the surface. For example, philosopher Sybille Krämer discusses how surfaces, often seen as reductive, hold power. In her exploration of “cultural techniques of flattening,” she argues that flattening — as seen in cave painting, cartography, and digital screens — is essential to human inquiry. I think of painting as a layer of skin: this superficial flatness becomes something like a database that stores memories the body and deeper layers forget.
This makes me think of the car-crash painting with your mother that you presented around the time of the Matsutani Prize. Could you speak more about that work: how it emerged, and what it holds for you?
That painting is suspended inside the memory of a car crash, but it’s also an erotic painting. The painting aims to breach the taboo subject of sexualizing one’s mother. I wanted to paint two female figures, me looking at her, or her looking at me, suspended inside this crash. Both are a projection of the other; we see each figure through the other’s eyes in the painting.
The erotic charge in the car crash paintings comes from how trauma works. During traumatic moments, the body goes into decreased capacity. Memory fragments. You might remember one strange detail while everything else disappears. I learned that this fragmentation also happens in ecstatic or extremely happy moments.
I’m interested in images that operate like that: disorganized hierarchies, fragmented memory. You can’t photograph that state. You can’t fully register it. Yet I try to evoke that sensation — where you hold onto fragments without being able to explain them.
THAT FLUIDITY, THIS IDEA OF SHAPE-SHIFTING,
OF WEARING MANY CLOAKS, IS STRONGLY PRESENT IN MY PRACTICE.
Your works are deeply rooted in symbols, and you’ve built a very personal visual language over time. How did this language first take shape, and how do you see it evolving today?
One area where I use symbols quite literally is through an alphabet I created. Making this alphabet was the moment when I felt I truly began building my own world.
I’m named Sequoia, my father chose the name. Sequoyah was a Cherokee figure who translated a previously oral language into a written one by creating a syllabary. Ironically, I’m very dyslexic and I always would feel ashamed to be named after someone associated with mastery of language. Creating my own alphabet allowed me to have a playful relationship with symbols where they can shape-shift and refuse fixed meaning.
For example, one of the letters, my “D”, comes from a dream I had about a guardian angel. He was new at being an angel, and kind of sweet and unsure about everything. So, he wore this ring that kept shifting between a lightning bolt and a cross, like a liquid aluminum form. He told me that whenever I saw lightning, it meant he was close. I woke up at four in the morning and there was a huge lightning storm outside. It felt so real for a second, that I created a symbol that merges the cross and the lightning bolt, something in between.
These symbols are like small adventures. I’m fascinated by how unstable they are. I resist rigid definitions when it comes to anything at all - I don’t believe we can make definitive statements about the world. And just the same, symbols, for me, are playful and unstable, they can’t be fully controlled.
@ Photography Roberto Ruiz
After receiving the Matsutani Prize, did you feel a deeper connection to his practice? In what ways, if any, did that dialogue become clearer to you?
Yes, very much. We share a resistance to defining things through language, even though our expressions are very different. When he blows liquid forms through a straw and creates these membrane-like sacks, it touches something in me. There’s a history of water and prenatal imagery in my work. I think about a contained sack, a membrane. He shows it externally; I often assume we’re already inside it.
There’s also the breath: the mouth; something passing through one object into another. In some of my paintings, I reference a traditional Native American pipe my father used. Smoking the pipe is a way of connecting to ancestors, as the breath travels through an object and opens language to the non-living. That relationship to breath and transmission connects me strongly to Matsutani.
And from a pragmatic perspective, did the prize bring new opportunities?
It did bring visibility. Many people attended the ceremony and reached out after.I believe certain opportunities will unfold over time. Above all, receiving a prize from another artist feels especially meaningful.
You’re about to open a show in Madrid at Carlier Gebauer. How (and if) did Madrid and Spanish culture influence your exhibition?
The exhibition is about sacrifice. When I was in Madrid preparing the show, I went to the Prado and kept returning to these paintings of Christ with the wound in his side. In so many of them, there’s a crowd gathered around that opening, almost wanting to touch it. I found that gesture strangely erotic — this desire to approach the wound, to come close to the place of sacrifice. That stayed with me and influenced one of the paintings in the exhibition, where a female body has multiple openings. Throughout the show, I’m thinking about domination, victimhood, extraction, and these repeating power cycles. If you imagine Christ as a pure figure who sacrifices himself, and people gathering to extract something from that purity, it raises questions about what it means to offer access to the interior of a body — something I consider sacred.
It made me think about sex work. It’s one of the few spaces where that dynamic of an access to the body can be consensual and compensated. And yet, similar forms of extraction happen constantly in workplaces, in relationships, in wars. They’re everywhere, but they’re rarely acknowledged, and often there’s no compensation at all. I started wondering if the discomfort around sex work comes from the fact that it makes this structure visible and explicit. That whole line of thinking really came from walking through the Prado. It shaped the exhibition in a very direct way.
FIN
About Sequoia Scavullo
Sequoia Scavullo (born in 1995, Baltimore) lives and works in Paris. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris with Mimosa Echard. The artist received the Diptyque prize for contemporary art, curated by Jérôme Sans (2022); the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Prize (2021); the Dean’s Research Award (2019); the Dona Pond Painting Award (2019) and the Will and Elena Barnet Painting Award (2017) and most recently the Matsutani Prize (awarded by the Schoen Fund) at the occasion of Asia Now
She has participated in the KHIAL NKHEL residency program, Morocco (2018) and the Yale Norfolk program, Ellen Battell Stoeckel (2017) and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Bielefeld (2022); Pigment Sauvage, Baltimore (2019). In October 2023, she will have a solo presentation at Paris+ by Art Basel with Sans titre, Paris. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at FRAC Corsica (2023); After Hours, Paris (2023); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2022); Exo Exo, Paris (2022); POUSH — Manifesto, Paris (2021); Haimney Gallery, Barcelona (2020); La Volonté, Paris (2020); Dorchester Art Gallery, Boston (2019); Piano Craft Gallery, Boston (2019); High Zero Foundation, Baltimore (2019); Barbara and Steve Grossman Gallery, Boston (2019); Yale Norfolk Galleries (2019).
