Brainard Carey's Blog, page 56

Edgar Oliver

Edgar Oliver, photo by Pavel Antonov

Edgar Oliver is a writer and performer who has lived and worked in New York for many years.  He started out reading his poems and performing monologues at the Pyramid night club in the early 1980’s.

From 1988 to 2001 he wrote and staged a series of autobiographical plays – premiering a new play almost every year in the Club at LaMama on east 4th Street.

Titles include The Seven Year Vacation, The Ghost of Brooklyn, Mosquito Succulence, Motel Blue 19, and The Drowning Pages.

In recent years he has written and performed a series of one man shows that have won much critical acclaim.
These shows include Helen and Edgar – directed by Catharine Burns of The Moth – and East 10th Street: self-portrait with empty house, In the Park, and Attorney Street – all three directed by Randy Sharp of the Axis Theatre Company.

The images below are book covers and spreads from the poetry books mentioned in the interview that are published and sold by Oilcan Press.

Slaven Lunar Kosanovic

Lunar – Photo by Sanja Tusek

Slaven Kosanovic, better known as Lunar, is a Croatian graphic and street artist, philosopher and interdisciplinary person; coming to both music and art as a child, Lunar entered what would become a career as an artist in 1989 when he first picked up a spray paint can.  Thirty years later, he is a unique living witness and participant in graffiti’s evolution since then as both a subculture and an art form, and the transformations of graffiti, hip hop, and electronic music subcultures in supporting one another towards their current mainstream popularity.

Lunar has always been pushed by curiosity, discovery, and creativity.  Around the time he realized he probably couldn’t make it as a paleontologist or natural scientist, a la David Attenborough — his childhood dream — Lunar was also fascinated by graffiti, hip hop culture, and discovering and collecting every possible form of music that he could find.  Entering the world of graffiti was a way for Lunar to assert the other, non-scientific side, of his identity as an interdisciplinary artist, to make sense of the world and find a place in it. As he began painting and establishing his network throughout Croatia, he was inspired by painters and musicians from other cities and countries who were building their lives in pursuit of the most idealistic dreams; by the early 1990’s Lunar was painting with them and friends throughout Europe, while offering them insider knowledge of where and how to paint in Croatia, and places to stay when others came to Eastern Europe.

Lunar describes street cats as confident, cheeky, independent, and symbolic of the streets; he also pulled his first artistic inspiration from his cat, Jinx.  His artistic career, built largely around continual reinvention of his Catso character, has also been much like that of a street cat: charting his own path, making his own rules, and constantly pushing his boundaries of creativity.  Thus, by the mid-1990’s, in seeking to expand beyond graffiti and nomadism, and to push the limits of his own creativity, Lunar entered a career in graphic design (while continuing graffiti); recently, he has also started hosting his own national-level radio show in Zagreb and DJing, both as a way of sharing his passion and excitement for hip hop and electronic music that has always inspired and propelled him as an artist.

Lunar’s constant search to discover and learn from other peoples’ experience, perspectives, and creative methodologies has led him to create art on every continent, and to be included in global graffiti publications including Graffiti world-Street art from 5 continents, 100 European graffiti writers,World Piecebook, Street art & Graffiti Europe, Street Art Graffiti Guide Paris, Graffiti Planet, Style is a Message, Painted Walls Havana, Munich Walls, Street Art Amsterdam, Street Art Zagreb, 400ml, The Book of Tags, and Cinco — 5 Years of Calle Libre.  Beyond the world of graffiti, Lunar’s work and ability to independently turn creativity into a successful career have also earned him features in Playboy, Forbes, Backspin, DJ Mag, Stylefile, Graphotism, Xplicit Grafx, Bomber, Urban Roots, and Code Red, and invitations to speak at TEDx Zagreb 2015 and CreArt Encounter 2019 in Aveiro, Portugal.

Lunar’s new book “From Zagreb with Love” is hotly anticipated as one of the first histories written of graffiti as a clandestine, global, multidisciplinary art movement in Eastern Europe, which also maps its parallel development with rap and electronic music, written from the inside by one of its first practitioners. “From Zagreb with Love” will be launched at QRU in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in collaboration with Street Art Museum Amsterdam, on 16 August 2019.

Rhytm of the Saints – Osijek 2016 – Photo by Samir Kurtagic
Blushing – Paris 2017 – Photo by Ivo Kosanovic

Some of the books mentioned in the interview are Vladimir Pistalo: Tesla: A Portrait with Masks and Matej Surc and Blaz Zgaga trilogy “In the Name of the State” also Henryk Sienkiewicz trilogy ‘With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Sir Michael’ Barbara W. Tuchman ‘A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century’

Ward Shelley

Ward Shelley works as an artist in New York and Connecticut. He is interested in constructed worlds and intersecting narratives; how they create, mediate and inform each other. He wants to know how things really work.

Shelley specializes in large projects that freely mix architecture and performance. For more than a decade, he has been collaborating with Alex Schweder, using experimental architecture to explore the dance between the designed environment and its consequences. Since 2007, the duo have designed, built, and lived in (or on) seven structures, all of them in locations where the public are invited not only to witness, but also to actively engage with the artists in direct dialogue about their practice—an activity that has coalesced into what they call “performance architecture.”

Shelley also works on diagramatic paintings: information-based timelines on culture-related subjects and historical postmortems. He frequently works with Douglas Paulson on installations and environments that attempt to turn mind, text, and meaning inside out (for a better look). They created the “The Last Library” project for Spaces in 2015.

Shelley’s work has been exhibited in more than 10 countries and is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Shelley received a Painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York.

 

 

George Abraham

George Abraham (they/he) is a Palestinian american poet from Jacksonville, FL. They are the author of Birthright (Button Poetry) and the specimen’s apology (Sibling Rivalry Press).
He is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Boston Foundation, and a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI).
Their poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, Mizna, and elsewhere.
He currently resides on stolen Massachusett land, where he is a Bioengineering PhD candidate at Harvard University, and teaches in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Order Birthright, in print or audiobook form, from Button Poetry: bit.ly/georgebirthright

Michael Bazzett

Bazzett and his dog, Zeus, playing chess during the pandemic. (photo credit: Leslie Bazzett)

Michael Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and translator. His debut collection of poems, You Must Remember This, won the Linquist & Vennum Prize in 2014, and his fourth collection, The Temple, was published by Bull City Press in 2020.

His fifth book, The Echo Chamber, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2021. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, Image, The Sun and Ploughshares, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed, 2018) was longlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award, as well as being named one of 2018’s ten best books of poetry by the NY Times.

He has received fellowships from the NEA, Teachers & Writers’ Collaborative; you can find out more at www.michaelbazzett.com.

Tim McFarlane

Tim McFarlane is a painter based in Philadelphia, PA. His paintngs and works on paper examine the fluid and contradictory nature of memory and place, with an emphasis on color, multi-layered systems and process. His practice has extended to include wall-based painting and drawing installations, as well. Much of his work is informed by everyday observations of the visual impact of human activity and engagement with the outdoor environments of his native Philadelphia. Tim is a 1994 Temple University/Tyler School of Art graduate who has exhibited his work extensively in the U.S. and has been featured in major art fairs in New York, Miami, Dallas and San Francisco. He has been a visitng artist and lecturer at several universities, has been a regular participant in artist panels and has taught at Tyler School of Art & Architecture. Tim McFarlane’s paintings and works on paper reside in numerous private and public collections such as Bucknell University, Fox School of Business (Temple University) and West Virginia University. His work is represented by the Bridgette Mayer Gallery (Philadelphia) and ParisTexas LA (Los Angeles).

The book mentioned in the interview was: Because Internet

Installation view of Until The Break of Dawn, 2020, mixed media on drywall,  9.5′ x 10′ x 3′

Shelley Hirsch

Born and raised in East New York Brooklyn, Vocal Artist, Performer, Composer, Storyteller Shelley Hirsch, has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory and her vivid imagination for decades. She has performed her work on five continents and can be heard on more than 70 recordings.

Hirsch has received prestigious awards including a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship; A Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists; four NYFA awards in Music and Interdisciplinary Work, a Creative Capital Grant , and residencies including the DAAD in Berlin, Yaddo,  and six at Harvestworks Digital Media Center in NYC. In 2018 Hirsch’s archives were acquired by The Fales Library at NYU for The Downtown Collection.

See / hear more of her work in quarantine include performance improvisations at home.  And Generating text Field recordings in Quarantine, and an excerpt from her performance/installation as artist in residence at QueensLab.

Jenny Roesel Ustick

Jenny Roesel Ustick is Associate Professor of Practice and Foundations Coordinator in the School of Art – DAAP at the University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA from the same program and a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. 

A Cincinnati native, Ustick has become one of the most prominent muralists in her region, completing over 10 large-scale public mural projects with ArtWorks and several independent projects that include commissions from the US Soccer Federation, 21C Museum Hotel Cincinnati, and multiple local establishments. Her Mr. Dynamite (James Brown) mural in Cincinnati has earned her and Cincinnati international attention. Elsewhere in the U.S., Ustick has created or contributed to murals in Tennessee, New Mexico, Illinois, Kentucky, and Florida, including invitations to the Walls for Women mural festival in Tennessee, and the CRE8IV Mural Festival in Rockford, Illinois. Internationally, Ustick has participated in the Proyecto Palimipsesto mural residency with La Fundación ‘ace para el Arte Contemporáneo y el ‘acePIRAR, Programa Internacional de Residencias Artísticas in 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was Artist in Residence in spring 2018 with the Graniti Murales program in Graniti, Sicily. 

Ustick’s multimedia solo and collaborative studio practice is based in drawing and painting, with expansions into multimedia textile and time-based installations. Her solo and collaborative works have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museum venues that include the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Dayton Art Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, and Redline Contemporary in Denver. She has participated in multiple international art fairs including Governors Island Art Fair in New York, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and ArtPrize. 

Ustick is also a published critical art writer, contributing essays to The Cincinnati Anthology from Belt Publishing, and Still They Persist: Protest Art from the 2017 Women’s Marches. Ustick’s mural projects have been featured in Forbes, American Quarterly, Hyperallergic, La Sicilia, and numerous local publications and broadcasts; collaborative studio projects have appeared in the Huffington Post and Venus Zine. You can find her work at www.jennyroeselustick.com, and on Instagram @j_r_ustick.

Tamy Ben-Tor

Studio Character 2, 2019, photo taken by Miki Carmi.

Born in 1975, Jerusalem, Israel. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Tamy Ben-Tor is a graduate of The School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem in 2001, and the M.F.A. program in Visual Art at Columbia University 2006. Using spoken word, various soundtracks, costumes, masks and wigs, Ben-Tor’s videos and performances are a hysteric embodiment of her surroundings and an amplified over exaggerated interpretation of “Normal”  .

“My consciousness is a sponge absorbing all of contemporary filth.

The artistic process for me, in the form of a performance, is to solidify this sponge into a hard stamp tool and press it back onto the audience’s consciousness for the duration of the performance.

At the end, I hope they come out of it stained, impressed, as I am, by the ailments of this time which we live in.”

She has had solo shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Kunsthalle Winterthur; and Cubitt, London. Ben-Tor has also participated in exhibitions at ZKM, Karlsruhe; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Biennale of Sydney; Manifesta 7; Mori Museum, Tokyo; MoCA, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; as well as the PERFORMA 05 and PERFORMA 07 Biennials, New York.

She has been collaborating with artist Miki Carmi since their joint Artists’ book “Disembodied Archetypes” Regency Arts Press , 2008.

To learn more, check out Minerva projects link for their book project. Also, here is links to the videos discussed in the interview: Suma Kom Laudum, 2020. Bill Gates, 2020 and Revenge of The Bureaucrats, 2020.

Studio Character 3, photo taken by Miki Carmi.
Video still from young emerging artists eating and fucking, 2015

Alissa Juvan

Alissa Juvan is an accredited coach and elevatED certified pole dance instructor.

A Vermont native, she moved to the UK for a number of years where she supported other artists in their creative careers through one-on-one coaching and development events before moving to Los Angeles to fulfill her own creative ambitions of being an actor.

Notable acting roles include “I Spit On Your Grave: Vengeance is Mine” and “Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television”, in addition to writing, producing and starring in an original series, “Kiddie Litter”, about a lesbian couple raising their son like a cat. Recently returned to Vermont, Alissa loves supporting other women through offering sensual movement workshops, one-on-one coaching, and retreats. Learn about her upcoming event here. The book mentioned in the interview was The Hate U Give.

Post-workshop and feeling fabulous
Still from sensual movement workshop free dance