Brainard Carey's Blog, page 43

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have been creating multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queerness together for 20 years. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995, and morphed into a feminist performance artist and sex educator. Beth was a sculptor and installation artist and became a University art professor.

She’s taught at University of California Santa Cruz for 27 years. These days the duo make environmental films through an ecosexual gaze, they produce symposiums, do theater and performance artivism. Their Ecosex Manifesto launched the Ecosex Movement.

They are making a new film about fire for which they got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. A new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press) chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures.

Claudio Zulian

Claudio Zulian is a visual and sound artist, film director, writer and musician. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics, Science and Technology of the Arts from the University of Paris-Saint Denis (France). He is a resident in Barcelona (Spain).

Many of Claudio Zulian’s works are articulated around the notions of body and territory, often ironically dialectised. An example of this is one of his latest works Vallès: making pasts, making futures, a series of video installations whose exhibition was on view at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona  in 2019, curated by Valentín Roma. Another example of the study of these concepts was the exhibition Double Self-Portrait (2019), at the Espai Souvenir gallery in Barcelona. Previously, these themes had given rise to other works such as those included in the exhibition Enthusiasm (2012) at the Bòlit Centre d’Art in Girona and in ACVic or Political Poetics (2008) at CaixaForum in Barcelona.

Complementing these two notions, another of the central issues in his works is history. Stories of the Future was the title chosen by the Jeu de Paume in Paris for the retrospective held in October 2013, which included pieces such as Power no Power (2013), L’Avenir (2004) and Panamamundi (2006).

In 2010 he received the City of Barcelona Award and the National Film Culture Award for his video installation, film and book A través del Carmel (The shifting city) – an intimate portrait of the eponymous Barcelona neighbourhood, shot in a single 90-minute sequence shot.

In 2020 he released We were not born refugees, a documentary about the lives of eight refugees in Barcelona. In the same year he shot The Magic Mountain, a documentary about the effects of globalisation in a village in northern Italy.

He has carried out an intense work as a composer and performer of contemporary music.

He regularly publishes articles in newspapers and magazines, many of which can be read on his blog.

La montagna incantata TRAILER from ACTEON on Vimeo.

 

 

 

Holly Murkerson

In collaboration with the fluid processes of photography, Holly Murkerson’s work makes visible an emergent space where body and environment bleed into one another. Based in Chicago, Illinois, Murkerson is a Co-Director of the artist-run gallery, Adds Donna.

Past exhibitions include 65Grand, Chicago; Comfort Station, Chicago; Rainbo Club, Chicago; Heaven Gallery, Chicago, Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Rockford University Art Gallery, Rockford, IL; Roots & Culture, Chicago; Julius Caesar, Chicago; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, The Ragdale Foundation, and Oxbow School of Art, as well as the recipient of grants from The Illinois Art Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

The book mentioned in the interview is Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. 

One and one make three, 2020 Unique silver gelatin print, 20 x 16 inchesTwo halves make a hole, 2020
Unique silver gelatin prints mounted on archival rag board, diptych, 20 x 36 inches

Ryan Takaba

Ryan Takaba is a material artist whose sculptures, tableaux, and installations are centered around a study of scientific reason and the power of belief, incorporating thematic materials -flowers, ash, wax, and water.He exhibits his work throughout the United States and has participated in residencies at the European Ceramic Work Center -Netherlands, The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen -China, and was awarded a residency through Blue Star Contemporary to live and work at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin -Germany.He earned an MFA in Ceramics from Kent State University and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Hawaii. Ryan currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.The books mentioned in the interview are Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik and The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. The Atlantic article mentioned can be read here.A Relationship with Flight 2020-2021 Glassine Paper, Ivory Roses, Basswood, Incense Ash, Helium, Latex, Pillar Wax, Wick, Steel   235” * 341” * 120”A Relationship with Flight 2020-2021 Glassine Paper, Ivory Roses, Basswood, Incense Ash, Helium, Latex, Pillar Wax, Wick, Steel   235” * 341” * 120”

Kara Lynch

kara lynch is a time-based artist living in the bronx, ny – born in the momentous year of 1968. kara completed the MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and has been a research fellow at the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas Austin and the Academy of African Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany. She is an emerit@Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College. In 2020 kara was awarded a Tulsa Artist Fellowship and joined Gallery of the Streets as a principled artist collaborator.

Her art practice is re-memory, vision, and movement. It manifests as poetics, process, and conjures autonomy for Black and Indigenous people across Diaspora. Through low-fi, collective practice, and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. This artist’s practice is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered – Black, Queer and Feminist.

Major projects include: ‘BlackRussians’ – a feature documentary video, ‘The Outing’ – a video travelogue, ‘MouhawalaOula’ – a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video & saxophone; ‘We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions’– an edited volume of Black Speculation; and the current project, ‘INVISIBLE’ – an episodic, speculative, multi-site video/audio installation that excavates the terror and resilient beauty of the Black-Indigenous experience.

Current explorations include: RuleReverse! a series of video interventions learning from Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade; “Come Prepared or Not At All” a series of drawings concerned with Black Towns and Futures. “Stories from the Core” a collaboration with Sarah and Maryam Ahmed; and Blues U – a bi-monthly radio show on radiocoyote.org/FM 90.1 Tulsa.

Spy-boi_prelude_RuleReverse! – still from performance September 2020/Greenwood Ave Tulsa, Indian TerritorySAVED [episode 03 of Invisible] postcard 2008/2013

Lola Clavo

Lola Clavo (Barcelona 1983) is an independent director-producer that often navigates the boundaries between documentary and fiction. A graduate in Film Directing by ESCAC (2007), she lived and worked in London for over 10 years, where she also graduated MFA in Film Making by Goldsmiths University of London (2012) on a full scholarship by Obra Social “La Caixa” Foundation. Her work has a strong social component, questioning gender roles, the representation of the body, femininity and sexuality. Her filmmaking philosophy is close to that of DIY, although always loyal to a theory and structure base learned during her years at film school. She’s been awarded several prizes, mostly related to the representations of sexualities, and screened work internationally. Clavo co-founded in 2012 the art collective Exotica Loom, along with multidisciplinary artist Mariana Echeverri, where they develop curatorial and experimental film projects. 

In 2006 she finished her fist documentary “La Plaza” (2016), an autobiographic reflection on subjects such as family, memory and the physical space around us. It premiered at Alcances Documentary Film Festival of Cadiz, wining the UPTOFEST prize for best medium-length film. Her following work, “Pennie” (2018), a portrait documentary reflecting on the concepts of feminity, body and sex work, was selected as closing film for the November Film Festival (London) and as part of Festival Rizoma’s parallel section Voyeur (Madrid), as well as being screened at an art gallery context. Clavo has also attended art residencies and been part of numerous talks and panel discussions in spaces such as Nottingham Contemporary and EACC (Space for Contemporary Art Castelló). She’s also passionate about  teaching and leads courses and workshops on filmmaking with an LGBTQ+ focus, as well as the portraying of intimacy in the audio-visual medium, specifically scenes with simulated sex and/or nudity.

The book mentioned in the interview is LA VIDA COTIDIANA DEL DIBUJANTE UNDERGROUND,  by Nazario.

A still from current project in development “WOMEN a butch ode”A still image from the film “Pennie”

MUJERES una oda butch – teaser corto from lolaclavo on Vimeo.

 

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is a poet and installation artist in St. Louis. She is the author of the poetry collections Well Waiting Room (Fordham University Press, fall 2021) and Cleavemark (BOAAT Press, 2016) and the children’s book The Cloud Lasso (Penny Candy Books, 2019). Her poems and art have appeared in Bomb, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, AGNI, Washington Square, At Length, The Offing, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Colorado Review, and on PoetryNow and the Poetry Foundation website, among others. She frequently collaborates with other artists, most recently with Cheryl Wassenaar on the installation The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs at the Des Lee Gallery. Her work can be viewed at stephanieschlaifer.com.“The Archive of the Interior,” from The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs. A collaborative, multimedia installation with Cheryl Wassenaar.Installation view, The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs. A collaborative, multimedia installation with Cheryl Wassenaar.Installation view, The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs. A collaborative, multimedia installation with Cheryl Wassenaar.

Montana Ray

Montana Ray is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her first book of visual poetry, (guns & butter), was described by Cathy Park Hong as a mix of “Apollinaire with Pam Grier.”She holds an MFA and a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on settler longing in the work of Cuban and feminist artist Ana Mendieta.Ray is at work on a narrative nonfiction book, To thicken it, which explores the relationship between “the South” and Central and South America through genealogies, monuments, and cultural performances; you can read her creative nonfiction in The Point, BOMB, Narrative Magazine, and The New Inquiry. She also translates from Spanish and Portuguese mainly feminisms of the 1970s.“Crazy Desire: chronicles of the AIDS ward,” Asymptote Magazine, 2020. Photograph by Leonora Calderón.“Os Confederados: ‘Family and History’ in the Plantation Americas,” The Point, 2020.

Emily Skillings

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.

Jarrett Key

Jarrett Key (b. 1990) lives and works in Providence, RI. Key is a recent MFA graduate from RISD Painting. Key is one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for Art and Style 2020. Key’s practice embodies several modes of production in one frame. Through form, image, and material, the objects they make integrate a sculpture, painting, and performance practice. Excavating lost stories and the oral histories that define their upbringing in rural Alabama, Key’s work seeks to criticize those historical conditions that are the seeds of contemporary issues in their life, while creating spaces that celebrate beauty, joy and survival.

Key has been featured in exhibitions and residencies at 1969 Gallery, Fierman Gallery, the RISD Museum, La MaMa Galleria, The Columbus Museum, Gallery 67, Swiss House/MGLC, Galerija Kresija, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Caelum Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Outlet Fine Art, Former Pfizer Pharmaceutical Factory, Secret Dungeon, La Maison D’Art, Shanghai Theater Academy, and East Meet West Gallery, among others.

Key’s work is in the collections of the The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, the Columbus Museum, Brown University, RISD Special Collection, the Schomburg Center, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions. The Hair Painting Series series has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Harlem Arts Festival in Marcus Garvey Park.

2019, Silkscreen and Cement on Paper
Collaboration with Merrick AdamsESP Slab 1 2018 40” x 30” Silkscreen on Cement