An interview and photography by Olivia Wünsche. Born in Ohio, US in 1987, and currently circulating between Berlin and New York, Dylan Solomon Kraus is best known for his oneiric nightscapes incorporating themes of the human psyche, clockwork interplays of the Cosmos and multilayered spiritual symbolism. Growing up hiking and camping, the artist’s early experiences seem to have instilled in him a profound reverence for Nature, now being visibly foundational to his work.
We came across each other over a year ago on the occasion of a mutual friend’s birthday party, hosted in a highly-rated restaurant in Warsaw. Wearing my hiking boots and oversized jeans felt like a discordant violation of the elegant dress code that prevailed this evening, which is likely why I remember it so vividly— Dylan’s laid-back demeanour contrasting with the posh formality of a seated birthday dinner gave me the sense of comforting familiarity. Dressed like a 90’s rapper covered in tattoos, he addressed other guests with genuine politeness and a piercing gaze whose depth was reminiscent of a 20th-century gentleman.
As the evening unfolded, we spent the remaining hours drinking pure Polish vodka, talking about the system— i.e. power structures, civilisational collapse and social upheavals, technological dependency, and how we’re placing our hopes in regenerative agriculture. Much of what he said resonated with me so strongly that I felt compelled to capture and convey his thoughts further—a whim he generously agreed to indulge.
We met again several months later in Berlin. I visited Dylan in his studio as he was putting the final touches on his third solo show entitled ExHypnosis with Peres Projects. The resulting interview covers a significant portion of our drunken ruminations.
In your previous work, Holy Unrest, you mentioned that the feeling of discomfort is a signal that something is not right. Could you elaborate on what this ‘something’ refers to?
There’s a discomfort that comes from being a human being on Earth which is natural. You don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know your relationship to the wider Universe, we’re just thrown into it. You have to face this discomfort and stop running from it, otherwise it will manifest itself sooner or later in different anxieties. Each individual has the responsibility of building their own vehicle for sailing into the uncertain. I like the motive of the boat because you can build one in so many ways- you could have no rotor, you could have a sail, you could have an engine or something we have never seen or imagined before. To intentionally set sail means to take hold of personal agency, to follow the stars in your boat, which you build with your attitudes, thoughts, and intuitions. Holy Unrest is that discomfort inside of you that drives you towards the right path.
Is there anything at a broader, systemic level that prompts this discomfort, which you think we should confront?
Definitely. The kind of forces which put people’s independence, self-reliance, the ability to provide, and meaningful work under assault. One has to push back against the prevailing limits on thoughts and imagination, against some sort of dogmatic divisiveness which we’re getting more and more into. The chasm between different kinds of understanding has grown a lot.
It used to be understood that people could have other views and still exist together. Now we’re in this time where anything that is against the grain is a perceived threat. But that is true diversity, a human garden, we’re all cultivating different things. You can’t just mono-crop thinking, even if it’s right. If there are some things that I think are right, I’m not gonna jam it down your throat, you’re allowed to live your life, and you’re allowed to see things, not the way I see them. It’s through individuals supporting and respecting each other that a larger societal change can occur. Otherwise, you’re trying to get out of the barnyard from inside the chicken coop.
What strategies would you consider most effective to achieve this change?
It’s really about not depending on the system for your inner life. Doing things like cooking, learning about the food system, unplugging, and having interests that are not phone-dependent is something you could start with. Not getting your feelings from the screen, not pouring out every thought on the screen—just not making it the central place to express your inner self is already radical.
How does art relate to protest?
Well, art is very powerful. I got into punk rock when I was younger, which was all about rebelling against power structures, polluting industries, interventionist wars and destabilizing foreign governments. It was subversive, and those in power didn’t like it or understand it. The thing about power is that it recognises the immense potential of art to light entire crowds on fire, to sway people. It can explain things very clearly. You know that art is powerful because of the desire to censor, or control it.
However, I think that protest alone is not enough. The more concise and clear you are with your ideas, the more effective they are. The broader social, technological, and life-on-earth changes that need to take place won’t be solved merely by protesting but by creative solutions that address the root problems. It’s this Beuysian idea of every person having to become an artist—workers, creators, craftsmen, architects, or poets dismantling repressive forces by recreating the fabric of the social organism as a work of art. Figuring out creative solutions is a true act of rebellion for me. There’s great power in using art for more than just vanity decoration.
It was subversive, and those in power didn’t like it. The thing about power is that it recognises the immense potential of art to light entire crowds on fire, to sway people. It can explain things very clearly. You know that art is powerful because of the desire to censor, or control it.
This leads me to the main theme underlying your last show, ExHypnosis. You said it alludes to breaking the spell, the need to wake people who sleepwalk through life. Things like sound bites, hot takes, social media, shopping, tabloid journalism, the 24—7 alarmist news cycles or the entertainment industry constantly driving our fears and desires, are all very efficient in keeping us distracted. What do you think we’re being distracted from?
The most relatable example of ExHypnosis is having a near-death experience in which one suddenly experiences transcendence, a state of perceptual vastness. I think that when confronted with the threshold between life and death, a whole other attitude and feeling arises—something of gratitude, wakefulness, the feeling of there being something bigger than myself.
ExHypnosis would be hypothetically a magic spell that could break the everyday confusion and aimless automatism. But distractions are nothing new, they didn’t come with the 24-hour news cycle and they wouldn’t end if we got rid of it, people on some level desire distraction. I would say that we’re probably being distracted from ourselves. Maybe distractions are there for us to help us not be paralysed by that dominating void which faces us every day from not knowing where we are to where we’re going, from thinking about what happens to our loved ones and to us when we pass. If we’re distracted from these archetypal and sometimes terrifying forces which frame our lives we can lose connection to our origin and true destination as humans.
Addressing existential anxieties is usually avoided in mainstream culture. What are the consequences that stem from this unwillingness to confront our mortality?
Indeed, our culture doesn’t cast any light on death, it is purposefully negating it. Just like garbage. People think they’ll throw it away and it will magically disappear. But I think it’s good to go to the funerals and spend time with people who are dying, just as seeing a newborn baby. Also, if you eat meat, you should perhaps kill your chicken once, defeather and cook it. Expose yourself to it. See how it’s all connected. You should have these experiences with death because they connect you to life.
We’ve lived with the realities of life, death and seasons since the very beginning. It’s remarkably new that we get to be free of it. Whenever I’m personally confronted with death, I start to see and value life so differently, that I immediately put importance on different things. Perhaps this is why it’s being obfuscated in our culture, perhaps it’s because you might re-evaluate your priorities and look for other ways to find satisfaction in life. Reflecting upon the fact that you will die can be a good meditation, a good way to bring courage to yourself and change the life you live, put in context.
Whenever I’m personally confronted with death, I start to see and value life so differently, I immediately put importance on different things. Perhaps this is why it’s being obfuscated in our culture, perhaps it’s because you might re-evaluate your priorities and look for other ways to find satisfaction in life. Reflecting upon the fact that you will die can be a good meditation, a good way to bring courage to yourself and change the life you live, put in context.
What is the Pandora’s Box piece about?
To me, it was about the development of artificial intelligence as it’s coming about right now. Pandora, which in Greek means the one who bears all gifts, was neither a god nor a person, she was a manufactured entity. In different stories, she opens up the box, in others, the jealous women of the town open it to try to find the secret. Pandora was a trap set about by the king, a punishment imposed on humanity for Prometheus’s actions. I was thinking about AI and opening up a non-human sphere of evolution, a sphere of consciousness that isn’t in any way connected to biological life and all the subsequent boxes that this opens up.
Technology is like fire, it can burn you or you can use it to heat your house and cook your food every day. It’s the same thing but infinitely more complicated. We should be using its powers for more than just novelty and hamster-wheel activities which are programmed to exploit people’s instincts for socialization. Getting views and clicks, lulling you into passive distraction until it all becomes a blur. It’s really about the moral capacity and the intentions that we use to work with it and not just some crazy, free-for-all. I feel exhausted by it, having been on an iPhone for ten years now, it just makes me tired to go through it. And I think it’s probably the point on some level.
What are your thoughts on progress as a dominant cultural narrative and how it shapes modern civilisation?
I think it’s addictive thinking. I just look at nature and how it’s cyclical. You have the sowing, then the harvest, you have the dead time, the alive time, the blooming time. You have cycles. I guess we’ve become dependent on constant growth and progression which is simply unsustainable as a practice, things don’t work this way. That’s the real trick that’s being offered—that you can have whatever you want forever, which is simply not true. People want to make progress without thinking about the consequences. Taking away meaningful work, taking away local production, homogenising all the sources of knowledge—I think it’s all very questionable. Progress towards what exactly? Some half-baked idea of what the human being can or should be? The final destination of Earth might not necessarily end up like the Jetsons.
People want to make progress without thinking about the consequences. Taking away meaningful work, taking away local production, homogenising all the sources of knowledge — I think it’s all very questionable. Progress towards what exactly? Some half-baked idea of what the human being can or should be? The final destination of Earth might not necessarily end up like the Jetsons.
What do you think about the modern education system?
If you care about things like class, equality, opportunity for everybody, and people not being outwardly oppressed by the conditions that they are born into, education reform is the place to begin. We know that the modern education system, at least in America, was engineered to make compliant factory workers, not free thinkers. This standardised, narrow model has produced generations of individuals conditioned to accept uncreative, surface-level learning and interaction with the world. The system is sorting kids by giving better opportunities and resources to those from privileged backgrounds, all the while marginalising others. It’s designed to reward those who fit the mould and punish those who don’t— even when this mould isn’t necessarily aligned with healthy development. And when you consider the problems our world faces today, it’s no surprise that people are confronting it as if they were writing a middle-school paper thinking that that’s enough.
When I look back at my time growing up, I think that this stuff was absolutely bonkers. We would spend all year preparing for these bubble tests, mindlessly regurgitating information just to secure school funding. They’ve drilled this nonsense into federally mandated school systems which then shoved a one-size-fits-all curriculum down our throats. But I was lucky, I managed to get an education despite going to school—an education in life. I think that true learning begins at home where you’re supposed to be raised and equipped with a thorough ground for a good future. Perhaps we need a less “modern” education these days.
How do you confront adversity? What helps you traverse life challenges?
I like to be physically active, I like to ride a bike, things that get my heart pumping. I try to have moments of being in nature, trying to be quiet—these are little gifts you can give yourself. It’s good to be in the state of not having great expectations of having everything figured out in a given moment but rather be accepting of things that are beyond one’s control—I try to learn to accept what I can’t have control over. I also try to stay in touch with my internal truths that aren’t dependent on whether people like me or not, on how I’m looking from the outside. And I try to be grateful, I feel like it’s a cure for all illnesses. There’s always so much to be grateful for.
Then, I look at people who have faced adversity in the past, and it inspires me how brave some of my heroes were. I was hugely inspired by Hans and Sophie Scholl of The White Rose and James Baldwin- brilliant minds. I love reading biographies of people who endured serious hardships, the power that comes from it is contagious. So I look to others when I don’t have the strength in myself. I think finding heroes, finding people you look up to in history and life and snuggling up to that is very powerful. You’re not alone.
Different artists and philosophers talked about this concept of creative epiphanies as autonomous entities coming to reveal themselves from somewhere else. Do you ever experience creativity in the form of sudden bursts of ideas popping out from the ether?
Those are lucky when you get them. You know when you get a real picture from the ether. I have a few images that have come to me, that are very powerful. But you don’t always get good ideas, not every day is that groovy. Some days you just clean your brushes, you clean up your mess, and you repaint over something you ruined. But these little moments of inspiration, man they’re good.
I like to think that the Universe is weaving and taking me places, somehow I’m experiencing the Universe expressing itself through me. The great ideas aren’t just self-concocted but are rather like a radio signal. When you’re tuned into the right station, you’re going to get certain information. And I’ve seen it in other artists too. Sometimes I’d be working on a piece and see another artist doing the same idea in their hand- we’re disconnected, there’s no crossover but I know that somehow we’re both getting the same radio wave. It happens all the time, we’re being influenced by the same inspirations.
Also, natural talent or sensitivity are one thing but it’s more important to just learn how to work. Stay active. You don’t always make great art. Look at all the greats- they did terrible pieces, it’s just that we’ve mainly seen the good ones. I like the idea of the eternal soup which you keep adding things to, having the practice hot and in motion, always pushing paint around. But there are no hard lines—sometimes I’d be banging my head against the table for weeks and then it cracks—all this banging was like cracking the egg. And that’s the nature of growth and consciousness that it happens in big bursts—one can be stuck creatively for a while and then boom, there’s a breakthrough.
How do you juggle between intuition and analytical thinking in your work?
They need to work together. I think it’s about finding a personal balance. You have to be guided by intuition but then you also have to constantly check yourself and learn. I try to stay non-analytical in the studio and purposefully avoid getting too much in my head. I try to keep my work simple, almost hieroglyphic. But I also read every morning outside of the studio. I like to look at art and watch how nature and society function. In some ways I need to lean on my analytical side when Im executing a bigger piece because I’ll think about it beforehand, I’ll lay out the paper first, and I’ll work out the little compositions. And the intuition would come in the shade of the colour, or the glow. It’s very much about what kind of boat you’ll create—how much of it is going to be wind how much is going to be rotor and what the relationship between the two will be to steer you.
What Nature means to you?
I heard an interesting comparison recently—we were created by Ma and Pa. Ma—matter and Pa—pattern. Nature is a combination of those things. It alludes to consciousness and intelligence. Consciousness expresses itself in many different ways. The power of light to grow things. Geometry passes through all things, you see different ratios everywhere. It’s purely spiritual.
I also think it’s a relentless fight for life, there’s never a dull moment, never a moment of void. It’s always exploiting the weaknesses and finding the strengths, pushing. It’s beautiful so much as it is terrifying.
Nature is also the context in which our ancestors and all living beings were born. When people practiced local agriculture they were more in tune with nature because they depended on it. Everybody knew if it was the full moon, a dry or wet year. Nowadays we’re living half in it, half out. We still bleed and shit, we get sick and die but at the same time we insulate ourselves from the larger facts and systems of nature. There is an effort to escape the natural world because it’s terrifying and one has to submit to it in some ways and try to overcome it in other ways. Which I guess is ok, but it can disconnect us from the realities of life.
My favourite thing to do is to sit somewhere far from power lines and highway sounds and just watch everything from the plants to the bugs and birds. Being in nature is humbling by how challenging it can get. When I’m in it, I feel very connected to something bigger, something that I’m a part of and something foreign to me.
Do we owe this separation from nature to the helping hand of transnational corporations and industrial agriculture?
Just look at who controls the seeds and how they are intertwined with power. Seeds are the very substance of independence for people and without them, we become tied to a system which controls our very sustenance. Food is as powerful as weapons or technology; its importance is universally recognized, which is why various entities want to control it.
Companies like Bayer and Monsanto patented seeds, GMO and pesticide production which gave them a near-total control over our food supply, masking it as the miracle of abundance. But in the process, they killed ancient agricultural practices which were truly beneficial to humans and the environment. Now we have invasive species, new pests, chemical pollution and climate fluctuations which have completely disrupted the equilibrium we once had.
We’ve lost so much nutrition from our food over the past three decades, that there’s no longer any life in what we consume. It seems to me as if they want to destroy the natural way of life and replace it with something they can extort people to pay money for all in the name of “progress”.
In the United States, local farms have been essentially put out of business, it’s almost impossible for them to thrive. And if small-scale farmers won’t grow your food, who will? Large mono-crop, industrial, computer-driven mega-farms? Entities whose primary interests are efficiency, mass production, packing, and exponential growth? What was once an integral part of every community has been outsourced to one or two major companies which are run by the idea of just making profits, a duty they are legally bound to fulfil. It’s difficult to compete with fresh produce from distant lands, and in this pursuit of enjoyment and convenience, we overlook the richness we’ve lost. Each corner of the world had once maintained a perfectly balanced diet and ecological farming methods. Agriculture, for centuries, was our lifeline, but only recently has it begun to pose a serious threat.
Just look at who controls the seeds and how they are intertwined with power. Seeds are the very substance of independence for people and without them, we become tied to a system which controls our very sustenance. Food is as powerful as weapons or technology; its importance is universally recognized, which is why various entities want to control it.
What cracks you up?
I have a deep appreciation for good comedy. I grew up reading a MAD magazine and Alfred E. Neuman’s iconic ‘What, Me Worry?’ became my lens for processing the complexities of the world—from matters of sex and TV to cultural and political events. Humour is an extremely powerful tool—whether for disarming a tense situation, bringing people together, or speaking truth
to power. It’s not just an expression—it’s an art form in and of itself. I also think that laughter is a vital necessity in life—it acts as a counterbalance to moments of sorrow.
I find joy in various comedic forms, from the wit of Danny DeVito to the absurdity of slapstick, the whimsy of cartoons, and the unique humour of British and Irish comedy. Being around someone with a great sense of humour is something I truly enjoy, and I seek moments of laughter every day.
About Olivia Wünsche:
“My work focuses on the role of cultural narratives as tangible forces shaping the very nature of our society. It amplifies various regenerative practices and vehicles different ideas derived from symbiotic relationships between nature and humanity.
I received a bachelor’s degree in graphic design after studying at ECAL, University of Art and Design in Lausanne (2018), and later went on to obtain a master’s in Photography, at ECAL (2021). I mix different mediums such as photography, collage, editorial design, digital painting, video, 3d, and installation. My practice oscillates between the applied and cultural fields. I live and work between France and Switzerland.”
The artist is Dylan Solomon Kraus / Instagram: @dylan3_14159265359
Photography and Interview by Olivia Wunsche / oliviawunsche.com
Instagram: @olivia.wunsche
Brand in use: Supreme
Instagram of the brand: @supremenewyork
