Becoming Animal, Antony Micallef

Together they form great shows and it’s just a process of trying to make those shows better and take them to different places.

It’s been said that there’s no shortage of “big thinking” on your part. Is that an accurate statement?

Yeah. (Laughs) I was talking with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago that said, “Do you just sit down after you wake up in the morning and think, ‘What’s the most impossible thing I can do today?’, and then set out to try and achieve it?” (Laughs again) Pretty much, yeah. I like coming away and doing ambitious projects and try to push the limits. If you look at all the elements of this show, it’s completely wrong. We’re a small gallery from London coming smack bang into the middle of Beverly Hills in one of the biggest retail spaces on the street and putting on a show for four months. Yet it seems to be working pretty well. We had about 10,000 people come through the Nothing to Declare show.

“Outside conventional practices” is a tagline that pops up a lot in your press materials. Why is the distinction so important it needs emphasizing?

I think we are outside. We’ve done things the way it seems the right way to do them rather than trying to follow any kind of art-world norms. So we come out and do the pop-up shows, off-sites, screen prints, all these things not normally done by your traditional, accepted, blue chip galleries. It’s about working outside conventions, bringing music into it, making art more fun…making it more of an event to go to rather than just a gallery opening. I don’t think there are many people who do that.