Aimee Goguen, Tongue Job, 2013. Hi-8 on SD video, color, sound, 3:40 min. Subjects: unknown. Image courtesy of the artist.

A video artist, experimental animator, and sculptor, Aimee Goguen has long explored the regenerative dimensions of bodily transformation and the uncanny interplay between mutilation and rebirth. The first time I experienced her work at JOAN in 2022, it felt like staring into a mirror at a bulging, pulsating tumor on my back—sweating with the personality of my queer subconscious. Oh—it’s you again, John Waters.

Through moving image, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Goguen’s work channels a visual language shaped by organic decomposition, sexual identity, and forensic intimacy. Raised in Southern California and trained at CalArts (BFA in Film/Video, MFA in Art), her practice draws from personal memory, family histories of emergency care, and the visual residue of ‘80s horror, psychological textbooks, and late-night TV. Sculptures resemble the offal of a post-traumatic ritual—intimate yet repulsive—while her videos induce trance-states, where gesture becomes a vessel for memory, mutation, and emotional puss.

Goguen recently premiered her first feature-length film, The Audition Tapes, at 2220 Arts + Archives. Featuring a sprawling cast of artists including Jeanetta Rich, Hayden Dunham, P Staff, Zackary Drucker, and Goguen’s sister Beth, the film is not a narrative but a procession of confessional ballads. Shot during the Eaton and Palisades fires and the 2024 election, it doubles as a psychic time capsule.

After the premiere, I caught myself forcing a fear-smile to cope with the discomfort of mingling—aware of the mask I was wearing, brittle as candy glass. The Audition Tapes cracked that mask, contrasting surface-level performance with raw song. I needed to delve deeper into this world of mutating, unguarded identities. So I interviewed Aimee Goguen; our conversation took place across emails, DMs, and phone calls over the course of three months.

Ezequiel Olvera: The textures and patterns I see repeating across your art practice remind me of radioactive tumors that boil and spill out, like in the nuclear horror flick The Hills Have Eyes (2006). The throughline I see is the liminality between life and death—a space that is giving, generative, and painfully transformative. There’s a correlation between the repugnant mutations and identities, be they sexual, biological, cultural, or intellectual—notions and perceptions need to be born anew from fungi or maggots. I’m thinking specifically about your 2022 exhibition “Mountain of the Collapse” at JOAN where you had these sculptures of motorcycle helmets foaming out with organic material installed next to CRTV monitors featuring videos of people sucking on each other’s tongues (Tongue Job, 2013) and other corporeal works like Gum Teeth Probing, 2015). Would you say your work uses physical decay and mutation as metaphors for psychological processing—like a visual form of psychoanalysis?

Aimee Goguen: I was always fascinated with the decomposition of plants and animals. I come from a family of first responders: policemen, firemen, nurses. I grew up hearing stories about illness and death, like this motorcyclist who crashed while on LSD. That particular accident happened before I was born, so those stories took on mythical qualities. I remember hearing about how a brain swells and spills outward into a giant plastic bag to protect it from external elements. Later in life, I discovered two species of sea slugs, Elysia marginata and Elysia atroviridis, which can self-decapitate and regrow a new body from their severed heads—humans can’t do that.1But we can surgically attempt head transplantation (cephalosomatic anastomosis), which is different from a whole-body transplant or brain transplant. 

I also remember growing up in Southern California in the ‘80s and how scared my mother was all the time, particularly about all the rapists and killers. Around this time, I had a lot of exposure to the 1984 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn on a small hotel TV in Los Angeles when I was five years old. I remember the things we were never meant to see, like things that accidentally slipped into a live TV broadcast, porno magazines, and watching other kids eat dry dog food.

Aimee Goguen, Mountain of the Collapse (installation view), 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN Los Angeles. Photo: Christopher Wormald.

Aimee Goguen, street walker, 2020. Recycled materials: fiberglass, latex, leather, rubber, burlap, foam, cotton, mummy tape, glue, wax, crayon, trash bags, crust, slime, spray paint, melted children’s toys (from childhood), plastic, trash, sludge of the earth, acrylic, gouache, 12 x 11.1 x 14.3 in. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN Los Angeles. Photo: Christopher Wormald.

EO: It’s interesting that you bring up dissection, swelling, amputation, and regeneration as both natural processes, but also in relation to some of the things you may have heard from family members. For starters, it brings to mind Ron Athey and Bruce LaBruce. Athey’s performance work often examines themes of bodily transformation and spirituality, with pieces like Torture Trilogy addressing the AIDS pandemic through raw, physical acts. LaBruce, a filmmaker blending viewership and voyeurism with regard to queer pornographic imagery in works like Otto or Up with Dead People and Pierrot Lunaire. Both engage with the limits of identity and the body, aligning with your focus on metamorphosis and regeneration.

AG: I admire both Ron and Bruce, but I wouldn’t say that my work is a direct reference. The first time I ever saw Ron Athey perform, he was naked on hands and knees while this lady, Juliana Snapper, sang opera into his ass. She eventually pulled out 100 feet of anal beads from his anus with her mouth. I co-curated Afterglow, a summer video series with Harry Dodge, which played a pivotal role in my evolution as an artist and video curator in Los Angeles. I learned a lot about L.A.’s queer history through Bradford Nordeen of Dirty Looks. My art practice is not centered around gay or queer histories, even though I am gay and I appreciate the history. My research is based on personal experience, memory and confabulation, doom and death. My all-time favorite L.A. queer video titled 100 Reasons by Sheree Rose, Bob Flanagan, and Mike Kelley features the rear view of Bob, getting paddled by Sheree, with a voiceover poem read by Mike Kelley.

Aimee Goguen, The Audition Tapes, 2025 (still). Hi-8 on SD video, color, sound. Image courtesy of the artist.

EO: In The Audition Tapes, you assembled a cast of artists and performers into a series of stripped-down, emotionally charged singing sessions—each moment more portrait than performance. What drew you to singing as the core structure of the film, and how did that approach contrast from your earlier works like Flex Video?

AG: I have terrible stage fright and anxiety while also being hard into voyeurism. I would go to this lesbian bar in Burbank called Moon Shadows and watch people sing karaoke. I found it really healing to watch strangers sing. These observations gave me the original idea to ask my friends to let me film them singing, like a live audition. When it came to actually filming them though, one-on-one and in isolation, my karaoke reference faded into abstraction and the focus of the work became these main characters and their emotional physiognomy—their inflections, micro-expressions, and vulnerabilities. In this way, The Audition Tapes has a relationship with Flex Video where I invited artists and friends to flex their muscles, like bodybuilders at a pageant or competition.

EO: The Audition Tapes featured so many talented L.A. artists, like Hayden Dunham, Nour Mobarak, Jeanetta Rich, Isabelle Albuquerque, Kayla Ephros, as well as your sister Beth Goguen.2I imagine that some had to be affected by the recent fires. Can you also speak on the urgent intimacy you experienced with your subjects and how The Audition Tapes might represent a unique moment in these artists’ lives?

AG: The Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, and the 2024 presidential election, were these catastrophic events that occurred during filming and post-production. Everyone carries their own unique vulnerabilities in The Audition Tapes, but for some of the participating artists these events may have directly influenced their performance on camera and how they were feeling on the particular day we filmed. For those individuals, The Audition Tapes may represent a time before drastic change; there’s also the possibility that loss and change had already occurred and someone is trying to cope. Regardless, the intimacy of each filming session made the film very sentimental on a personal level. Despite the personal significance, I feel that anyone can watch the film without knowing the performers and experience the vulnerability of singing, and the repetition.

EO: When I look you up on the web, the first result that comes up is “Aimee Goguen – Animator.” The word animation derives from the Latin word anima, which translates into “breath” or “soul,” so through animation we bestow this breath into that which has no life. How do you see that happening in your experimental film work, specifically the close-ups you do with artists? Could you describe how this might apply to identity?

Aimee Goguen, Flex Video (Paul), 2024 (still). Hi-8 on SD video, color, sound by Angel Zinovieff. Image courtesy of the artist.

Aimee Goguen, Flex Video (Tom), 2020 (still). Hi-8 on SD video, color, sound by Angel Zinovieff. Image courtesy of the artist.

AG: I primarily work in moving image, so animation plays a big part. I really like the word “animation” and the different ways it can be applied; it reminds me of repetition and torture. I also enjoy the use of the word in a medical context, like when a person is on life-support and their body is in a state of suspended animation. My sister is a nurse practitioner and she mentioned that when death occurs there is limited time to pose the body. She might close the eyelids, roll up a small towel, and place it under the chin. This act is a manipulation of the body. In this case, my sister is an animator of the dead or the unconscious. Do you remember when Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire? During a freak accident on the set of a Pepsi commercial… “animation.” In the film L.A. Plays Itself by Fred Halsted, there is this really beautiful fisting scene where one man is puppeteering another man’s body through his ass; this is another direct technique in animation.

EO: There is a brief scene in L.A. Plays Itself of an illustration depicting a mutant alligator morphing into a human hand. That moment shot into my subconscious because it aligns with my own interest in illustration, but also the liminal space between mutation and your vision of animation.

Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself captures Los Angeles as both a setting and a character. It verges on gay porn, but it’s a completely experimental film. He combined raw sexuality with reflective storytelling. The submissive character in the end who gets kicked and fucked feels like he’s fresh from the Midwest. There is this unraveling that happens when you come to California and get lost in the culture that you may or may not have been expecting. That alligator-hand moment connects the sexual impulses of the characters to myths and Greco animism.3 

AG: It also reminds me of a drawing by Luigi Serafini depicting a couple having sex while morphing into crocodiles.4Or an image on the underbelly of a skateboard scratched-up and grinded to hell. There is this really great moment at the end of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) where he inserts the 1938 cover of LOOK magazine, which features this beautiful skull-headed lady standing in this green glowing light with a blonde wig, smoking a cigarette.5

EO: Kenneth! Wow, yes. It’s amazing that he lived until the age of 96. To watch Scorpio Rising and L.A. Plays Itself when they were first made must have been a very charged experience, especially with the intensity of being a part of queer culture in the 1960s and ‘70s. 

I’m drawn to your work because of its varying forms of media, but also because there’s a graphic and illustrative quality to some of your works. As a young boy I loved MAD magazine and illustrators like Basil Wolverton, R. Crumb, and Peter Kuper. Where do you see your work splitting off from the whimsical grotesque of the late ‘60s?

Aimee Goguen, From Girls to Blob, 2014 (still). Hi-8 on SD video, color, sound. 1:44 min. Subjects: Cosima and Joanna Swan. Image courtesy of the artist.

AG: I was into Garbage Pail Kids which is kind of like MAD magazine, but I really loved watching late-night scary television shows like Tales from the Crypt or rerun episodes of The Twilight Zone. I would skip school and hide in the library and draw. I was more excited by science-focused picture books because it was hard for me to read. I would sneak into my parents bedroom and look at photographs of Elizabeth Short cut in half. Or the body of Evelyn McHale resting atop a crushed and busted United Nations limousine after jumping to her death from the Empire State Building in 1947. Most of my books are science and psychology books from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I really loved the diagrams and drawings in this 1974 book set titled Understanding Human Behavior.

EO: In your 2024 show “dark dark room” at Artist Curated Projects, you explored floral wallpapers. Victorian and Baroque wallpaper are almost like scenes in still lives with a variety of botanical life. Did you dig into the history of American and European wallpaper while you were making these works?

AG: When I was a child I lived in a yellow Victorian house with floral wallpaper and burnt orange carpet. My bedroom closet wallpaper had boats and ships floating in the water with seabirds flying in the sky. I always loved seeing beautiful wallpapers and ugly carpets in crime scene photographs and classic Hollywood movies. I prefer older movies with practical effects and early computer animations. I’m not usually a painter, but I worked for the film industry painting sets and making props for low-budget films, so I felt very excited to paint in this way. I digitally reconstructed the wallpaper from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. I had a fever from a virus and hand drew the wallpaper from inside Agi’s Counter in New York.

Aimee Goguen, basment room, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 22 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Artist Curated Projects.

Aimee Goguen, play room, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 22 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Artist Curated Projects.

EO: If an architectural firm were to commission you to design a wallpaper for a residence or business, would it be a painting? Could you see yourself making an entire wallpaper that covers an interior, wall-to-wall; floor-to-ceiling; outside and inside?

AG: I would like to do my future home with handmade ceramic maggot tiles and delicious wallpapers. This would be ideal but I feel kind of selfish about it, like Leigh Bowery and his wardrobe. He mostly only made outfits for himself to wear.

Aimee Goguen, a strawberry thief, 2024. Pen, marker, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 22 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Artist Curated Projects.

EO: You also print and work with shirts, which are cryptically bold in this L.A. junkie type of way. Would you ever consider textile work, like turning to fabric, fashion, or furniture?

AG: L.A. feels kind of desperate in this way, like everyone is a zombie salesman or sleepless vendor, trying to survive and/or make it big. I originally created some T-shirts with the help of Seth Bogart to fund plastic surgery for myself. I don’t like fiber art or cloth or fashion; I only wear black or different variations of faded black. I try to blend in with the shadow of a tractor or whatever is around, like that large pile of trash in the center of Alexander McQueen’s 2009 fall-winter runway show The Horn of Plenty.6

EO: That collection had a lot of houndstooth patterns, and the runway felt like Marilyn Manson-meets-a-Matthew Barney set—not to bring up more white male references. I also like how you mention couture fashion amid your interest in guts, detritus, and queer film…

Finally, could you give me three to four song recommendations I should listen to if I were to take LSD and stare at your paintings for a day?

AG: I have only been accused of taking acid my whole life by my family members, but have never actually taken more than a microdose of LSD or psilocybin mushrooms as a mood-stabilizing test. The sound would need to complement a long-exposure type of experience. I imagine something instrumental or singing in a non-English language: ten hours of thunder-lightning and wind sounds from a kids’ Halloween cassette tape,7Mariah’s Utakata No Hibi (1983),8the Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) soundtrack,9and anything by the CalArts Balinese Gamelan Ensemble.10

Aimee Goguen, Paddle Boxing, 2011 (still). Hi-8 on SD video, color, sound. 3:28 min. Subjects: Keith Ballard and unknown. Image courtesy of the artist.