Brainard Carey's Blog, page 52

Jim Torok

Self portrait, 2004, Oil on Panel, 5 x 4″

Jim Torok was born in South Bend, Indiana. He moved to New York in 1979 to study art at Brooklyn College, and received an MFA there in 1981. Several years later, Torok began doing cartoons as a regular feature for Paper Magazine, while at the same time doing realistic paintings of interiors and objects. He also produced animations for MTV.

In the mid ‘90s he started making miniature portraits, and had his first one person show at Bill Maynes Gallery in 1997. He has been making and exhibiting both cartoons and portraits ever since. Torok’s work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe, including a one-person show at the Denver Art Museum, and a three-person show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Recently, several of his pieces were added to the collection of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in 2023. Represented by Hyphen Advisory .

The book mentioned in the interview is My Struggle, Book 6, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Day55, 2020, Ink on Paper, 11 x 8 1/2″Do Not Worry About It, 2020, Acrylic on panels, 5′ x 26′

 

Wilfried Souly

Wilfried Souly, photo: Robyn Nisbet

Wilfried Souly is a choreographer, dancer, drummer and Taekwondo expert, originally from Burkina Faso in West Africa. He was trained in African traditional and contemporary dances since his youngest age in the acclaimed company “The Bourgeon du Burkina.” In September 2000, he co-founded “Compagnie Tâ” with two other choreographers and co-choreographed many dance pieces presented around the world, including one work that was selected as a finalist at the fifth Choreographic Encounters of Africa and Indian Ocean in Madagascar. The piece was then presented at the Great Barbican Center in London for a full week event. Compagnie Tâ also collaborated with an association of visual artists on Genies de la Bastille, Paris. Willy himself has collaborated with international choreographers and performed in works such as Space i Tiempo, choreographed by Robert Battle (USA) and Gerardo Delgado (Mexico) in Tampico, Mexico; and Dole Danle, with the French Hip-Hop Company E.Go, directed by Eric Mezzino and Gilles Schamber. In 2007, Willy moved to Los Angeles and joined Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project as an Associate Director, where he co-choreographed and performed Arbre D’Adaptation (2007), which won the Best Choreography award at “Emerging Above Ground 07”; Sira Kan (2008), presented at the NOW Festival 08; and “Dar Es Salaam” (2009).

Willy has collaborated with many local artists and companies, including Maria Gillespie (Exquisite Corps 2010), Victoria Marks (Smallest Gesture/Grandest frame; Medium big inefficient considerably imbalanced dance; Solar Duplex & Watch This), Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre Company (Governing Bodies; Expulsion; Governing Bodies Ventura; Cleopatra; Catch your Breath) and Viver Brasil Dance Company (Xire 2008). He choreographed and produced the dance film Bayiiri (Home Town) in 2011. In 2014, his solo “Saana/The foreigner” is premiered at the Redcat NOW Festival and the Ethna Negria Celebration at Teatro Balboa in Panama City May 2015. “Unarmed”, a piece about social injustice, was presented at the Barnsdall Theater, at “For Our Boys” first edition.

In August 2016 he created On Becoming, a quest for identity at 12th edition of NOW Festival. On October of the same year, his last two works Tekre (Evolution) and Maam /Me were presented at the third Edition of the festival Africa in America at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre. Willy is an Adjunct professor at the UCLA World Art & Culture/Dance Department since 2009 and has been guest choreographer at colleges including Santa Monica College, Los Angeles Valley College, Chadwick school… He teaches community West African Dance classes at Your Neighborhood Studio in Culver City, and has been an Arts Educator for the Fullerton School District since 2009. Willy is currently anMFA candidate at the UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance department.

The book that was mentioned was Vetiver by Librecht Baker.

“Unsung”, rehearsal at Centre de Development Chorégraphique in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Photo by Wilfried Souly“Saana/The Foreigner”, NOW Festival at Redcat Theatre in Los Angeles. Photo: Steve Gunther

Will Corwin

Will Corwin, photo: Brett DakinWilliam Corwin is a sculptor and journalist from New York. He has exhibited at The Clocktower, LaMama and Geary galleries in New York, as well as galleries in London, Hamburg, Beijing and Taipei. He has written regularly for The Brooklyn Rail, Artpapers, Bomb, Artcritical, Raintaxi and Canvas and formerly for Frieze. He curated and wrote the catalog for Postwar Women in 2019 at The Art Students League in New York, an exhibition of the school’s alumnae active between 1945-65, and 9th Street Club in 2020, an exhibition of Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Mercedes Matter, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and Elaine Dekooning at Gazelli Art House in Mayfair. He is the editor of Formalism; Collected Essays of Saul Ostrow, to be published in 2021 by Elective Affinity Press, is curating Downtown Train at PS122 in March 2021 which features the work of Boris Lurie, Penny Arcade, Gabriella Grimes, Gordon Matta-Clark, and many others, and he will participate in the exhibition Roots/Anchors at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in August 2021. He currently has an exhibition “Green Ladder” at Geary Contemporary in New York, on view through April 24th.  He is represented by Geary.The book mentioned in the interview was Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.Green Ladder (Installation) 3, images courtesy GearyDouble Ladder, 2020, aluminum, 40 in. x 10 in. x 6 in. image courtesy Geary

Tim Okamura

Tim with Nurse Tracy in progress

Tim Okamura investigates identity, the urban environment, metaphor, and cultural iconography through a unique method of painting – one that combines an essentially ‘realist’ approach to the figure with collage, spray paint and mixed media. The juxtaposition of the rawness and urgency of street art and academic ideals has created a visual language that acknowledges a traditional form of story-telling through portraiture, while infusing the work with resonant contemporary motifs.

Born in Edmonton, Canada, painter Tim Okamura earned a B.F.A. with Distinction at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Canada before moving to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts in 1991. After graduating with an M.F.A. in Illustration as Visual Journalism, Okamura moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he continues to live and work.

Tim Okamura – a recipient of the 2004 Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts – has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout the world, including the U.S., Canada, Italy, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Ecuador and Turkey, and has been selected nine times to appear in the prestigious BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

In 2006, Okamura was short-listed by the Royal Surveyor of the Queen’s Picture Collection for a commissioned portrait of the Queen of England.

In 2013, the University of North Carolina hosted a retrospective exhibition of Okamura’s work that focused on nearly a decade of production.

Okamura received an invitation to The White House in the Fall of 2015 to honor artists whose work addresses issues of social justice – there he received a letter of commendation from Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden.

Okamura’s painting titled “I Love Your Hair” was selected in 2016 for inclusion in the “American Portraiture Today” exhibition, featured at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and subsequently toured museums across the United States.

Several of Okamura’s works were recently featured in the “Still I Rise” exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Tim Okamura’s art is on display in the permanent collections of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Jiménez Colón Museum in Puerto Rico, The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Toronto Congress Center, the Hotel Arts in Calgary, Canada, and Standard Chartered Bank in London, England.

Collectors include Uma Thurman, Meg Ryan, John Mellencamp, DJ Black Coffee, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, athletes Courtney Lee and PK Subban, director Ben Younger, and actors Bryan Greenberg, Hill Harper, Annabella Sciorra, and Spike Lee.

 

 

 

 

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You and Starling Days. She has won The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award and been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an NPR Great Read.

Rowan’s first novel Harmless Like You.

Janet Biggs

Janet Biggs Photo Régis Figarol

Janet Biggs is an interdisciplinary artist known for her immersive work in video, film and performance. Biggs’ work focuses on individuals in extreme landscapes or situations, navigating the territory between art, science and technology. Her work has taken her into areas of conflict and to Mars (as a member of crews at the Mars Desert Research Station and Mars Academy USA). Biggs has worked with institutions from NOAA to NASA and CERN. She has collaborated with high energy nuclear physicists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, Arctic explorers, aerospace engineers, astrophysicists and a robot named Shimon. Last year, Biggs sent a project up to the International Space Station as part of MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative.

Biggs has had solo exhibitions and film screenings at the Museos de Tenerife; Neuberger Museum of Art; SCAD Museum of Art; Blaffer Art Museum; Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; among others.

Her work and research have been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, ArtForum, ARTNews, Art in America, and many others.

Biggs is a member of the New Museum’s cultural incubator, NEW INC with the support of Science Sandbox. She works with Cristin Tierney Gallery, CONNERSMITH, Galerie Analix Forever and Hyphen-Hub.

Learn more on Instagram.Here is a link to RSVP for the April 8th performance discussed n the interview: https://www.cristintierney.com/events/26/The books mentioned in the interview are Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire, the biggest ideas in science from Quanta, Edited by Thomas Lin, The Sublimity of Document, Cinema as Diorama by Scott MacDonald, and Women Artists, The Linda Nochlin Reader, edited by Maura Reilly.“Singular Value Decomposition” announcement for upcoming July 8th performance.“A Step On the Sun,” 2012. Four-channel HD video installation with sound.“Weighing Life Without a Scale,” 2018. Three-channel HD video installation with sound. 

Jeffrey Say

Jeffrey Say is an art historian specialising in Singapore and Southeast Asian art history. An author of numerous essays on art, his seminal co-edited work Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art (2016) remains a critical anthology for researchers, curators and students on Singapore art to date. Importantly, Say undertook pioneering research and study of the history of sculpture in pre-and post-war Singapore.

Prior to joining LASALLE College of the Arts in 1997, Say was a curator at the then National Museum where he was overseeing the collection of Buddhist and Indian artefacts. As a museum curator, Say curated major exhibitions on Tibetan Buddhist art, the maritime silk route and Alamkara: 5000 Years of India.

Say has been instrumental in the development of art history studies at LASALLE supporting artists to develop a contextual and historical understanding of the evolution of visual arts. In 2009, he designed the world’s first Master’s programme focussing on Asian modern and contemporary art histories. He is presently its Programme Leader. This programme has produced graduates who have made significant contributions to the field in the area of scholarship and curation.

Say is a public advocate of the importance of art history as a way to promote visual literacy. He is a frequent public speaker at museums, universities and galleries, and conducts short courses which remain hugely popular among various publics. Say is also a regular commentator on the local visual arts scene.

Say’s current research interest is on Singapore modern and contemporary art histories. He has written an essay on the early contemporary art scene of Singapore which offers a revisionist view on the beginnings of contemporary art in Singapore (published in the July-Sept 2019 edition of BiblioAsia). He is currently working on the second volume on Singapore modern art as well as a children’s series on Southeast Asian art and culture, both of which will be published in 2022.

His essay on the beginnings of contemporary art in Singapore can be found on this link; July-Sept 2019 issue.Book cover with flap open

 

 

 

 

James Maurelle

James Maurelle is an interdisciplinary artist, sculpture, video, photography, and sound art are his analog and digital primes. His work investigates the correlation formed between labor and creativity, at the center of this byway is the spirit of his work. Constructing objects and moving images are not unlike creating music compositions, the accompaniment, i.e., tools and materials, are a call and response to dexterity. The rubric to complete any composition is to know ones’ instrument(s)/tools; the creative process is based on this reciprocal understanding.

Jazz is the primer which propels the work, the tone/feel of every composition is in direct association with the culture. Every object I compose is a physical versioning of a historic recording or happening, every tool used is an augmented scale referencing an industrial progression. The materials (wood, metal, plastic, film) are the staff paper, and every committed strike upon these materials forms a note or chord. The fluidity connecting mind, hand, and tools are based on the augmented triad which is the cornerstone of my work ethic. The main objective is to continue creating full-bodied compositions, as long as the staff paper flows, I will inscribe upon it.

His work has shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Austin, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Richmond, Cincinnati, and San Francisco. He is a recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship (2015).

Javier Orcaray

Javier Orcaray, (Barcelona, 1980) is a Spanish cultural manager, curator, photographer and environmental activist. He holds a MA in World History and a MA in Visual Culture: Theory (NYU).

In 2010 he opened the artist residency La Fragua, which soon became a benchmark in Spain for research and thought in the rural world.

In 2014 he was a founding member of CoMbO, an independent arts space in the city of Cordoba that proposed new exhibition discourses based on the production work at La Fragua, with emerging contemporary artists such as Jacobo Castellano, Nathalie Haüsler, Angel Masíp, Tobias Sojber, David Bestué, Pablo Captain del Río, Fernando M. Romero, ATOI, Laia Estruch, Ethan Hayes-Chute and Tommy Hovik among others.

In 2020 he opened /Plata, the only independent space in Cordoba dedicated for the arts and transdisciplinary research.

Included in his most relevant curatorial projects are:

“Mi casa es tu Casa” with the international collective Kandor13 (Catherine Czacki, Brock Enright, Pablo Jansana, Daria Irincheeva, Andrea Galvani, Cecilia Vicuña, Carolina Saquel, Santiago Reyes Villaveces, Balam Bartolomé, Esperanza Mayobre, Angélica Teuta, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Felix Lazo, Lars Laumann at Centro de Arte Pepe Espaliú).

“How a Grape can Float in the Ocean” with artist Javier Arce at Centro de Arte Pepe Espaliú as part of the 16th biennial of photography in Cordoba .

“AABAS: Art Agriculture Biodiversity Food and Health” a symposium of experts and artistic residencies with Pedro Soler, Aniara Rodado, Laura M. Dávila, Daniela Moreno-Wright at the Center for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia.

Plata. The new cultural space in Cordoba, 2021Adding compost for AABAS (Art, Food, Biodiversity and Health) at Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía 2017CoMbO (2014-206). Tommy Hovik and Pablo Capitán del Río. Exhibition at our gallery.

Jennifer Coates

Jennifer Coates is a painter based in NYC and Lakewood, PA. She has a solo show up through April 8 entitled “Pagan Forest” at the Knauer Gallery at West Chester University in PA. Other recent solo shows include “Toxic Halo” at High Noon Gallery, NY 2020, and “Correspondences” at Freight and Volume Gallery, NY.She has collaborated with Wells Chandler in the show “Electric Mayhem” at Crush Curatorial, NY and with David Humphrey in the shows “Mountain Man and Uncle Fritz” at Fiendish Plots in NE and “Plush Onus” at Arts & Leisure, NY. She is the 2021 recipient of the John Koch Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a residency from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2019, as well as a residency at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in 2018-2019.She plays violin, ukulele and sings, performing with various bands in the pre Covid times.Books mentioned in the interview are; What Color is the Sacred by Michael Taussig, Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, Parable of the Sowers by Octavia Butlerand A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet.Triumph of Pan (Aqua), acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 5×6 ft, 2020Triumph of Pan (Purple), acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 4×5 ft, 2020