Brainard Carey's Blog, page 59

Christopher Grimes

Born in San Francisco, California, Christopher Grimes founded Christopher Grimes Gallery which presented a diverse yet rigorous program of contemporary art in a variety of media including painting, photography, installation, performance, sculpture and video. Over the gallery’s 40-year history he organized its many exhibitions, most notably Amnesia and Super 8, which traveled to institutions in the US, Europe, North and South America, including the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and the Bronx Museum, NY among others. The gallery was involved in the early development of the careers of artists such as Katharina Grosse, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Ernesto Neto, Fred Tomaselli, and Lisa Yuskavage.

He has presided over the Santa Monica/Venice Art Dealers Association and served on various international institutional boards, panels and juries including the ARCO Art Fair in Madrid, Spain, the Otis College of Art and Design Board of Governors in Los Angeles, the Otis Parsons School of Design, President’s Advisory Council, Los Angeles, and served as Program Advisor for the Getty for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.

Inspired by an interest in architecture and its relationship with art, he began developing a program focusing on integrating the two disciplines by collaborating with artists who incorporate architecture in their work. Following the closing of the gallery in 2018, he launched Christopher Grimes Projects, a multidisciplinary contemporary art program which focuses on facilitating the integration of art and architecture for large scale, site specific environments. He, alongside his son Jarred Grimes who assists in program development, aims to bring architecturally and culturally informed work to the public sphere bridging the connection between art and architecture through impactful and innovative projects.

The book mentioned in the interview was Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

CHRISTINE CORDAY, Sans Titre (untitled), 2020 Permanent installation, Crane Hall, Saint-Paul-Lez-Durance, ITER, France Christine Corday’s two-pound sculptural object, Sans Titre, represents Art as the 36th contributor to mankind’s largest terrestrial realization of the celestial. The site-specific and functional work, which the artist forged from metals derived from ancient stars, was integrated into the ITER fusion device late last year, a physical manifestation of Art that stands alongside the material contributions of the 35 major international country collaborators, an infrastructural object within the fabricated star that will harness fusion energy for human use. Sans Titre functions both symbolically and functionally in merging the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings between Art and Science, an intersection that is frequently overlooked. Both science and art are human attempts to understand and describe the world around us. The categorizations of science, art, chemistry, architecture, archeology, and cosmology separate what materially is unified. The subjects and methods have different traditions, and the intended audiences may be different, but the motivations and goals are fundamentally the same. Image credits: ITER Organization / R. Arnoux / EJF Riche
LUCIA KOCH, Dusk and Dawn, 2019 TEGNA Headquarters, Tysons, VA Light and air are the vital substances of a space, converting it into a place to be inhabited and transformed. Dusk and Dawn was created for an environment of coexistence and communication—though sound and air are isolated, transparent (glass) walls offer a visual continuity in between distinct spaces. For the TEGNA headquarters designed by the architectural firm Lehman Smith & McLeish (LSM), Koch created a work comprising a thirty foot LED back-lit color gradient lightbox that spans the height of the three-floor atrium. The lightbox establishes a dialogue with the free-flowing curtains installed on the opposing side of the atrium. The curtains, though separated by a floor, represent one continuous vertical color gradient establishing the overall unity of the work which represents the color transitions throughout the course of the day. Image credits: Christopher Grimes Projects

Elisa Strinna

Elisa Strinna, photo by Jessica da Silva

Elisa Strinna is an Italian artist currently based in the Netherlands. Her work investigates the nature/culture bisection, addressing, in particular, the interdependence between individuals and technologies and the byproducts of such affiliations. She does that by studying different types of infrastructures -from the geodetic to telecommunication ones, up to green infrastructures.

Through sculpture, sound, and video, the artist intends to activate aesthetic ecosystems in which some of the hidden relationships that constitute a landscapes emerge. In these hybrid worlds, it becomes difficult to draw a separation between natural and artificial, geological and human, spiritual and material.

Her works have been exhibited at Culturgest Porto (2020), Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei (Taiwan, 2018), at Giardini Greenhouse of the Venice Biennale (Italy, 2015), at the MAXXI Museum (Italy, 2014), at 2012 Taipei Biennial (Taiwan, 2012), at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Guarene (Italy, 2009), amongst others. She attended the international residency program at Jan Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, the Netherlands 2018/2019).

The book mentioned in the interview is Laboratory Life.

Blind Sun/ Sol Cego, Installation view, Culturgest Porto (PT), 2020; Mixed Media (Porcelain, stoneware, copper, alum crystals, sound (30 m). courtesy the Artist, photo © Alexandre Delmar
Blind Sun – Third Nature, Culturgest Porto (PT), 2020; Mixed Media (Porcelain, copper, alum crystals, sound (30 m). courtesy the Artist, photo © Alexandre Delmar

Andre Bogart Szabo

Andre Bogart Szabo creates paintings and wall mounted sculptures that explore the transformative power of repetition. Embracing informal materials such as gravel, fireworks, and foraged materials, Szabo creates expansive abstract fields that are chaotic, expressive, and minimal all at once. He received his BA in Post-Production from Emerson College’s Visual Media Arts department in 2012. Szabo currently lives and works in New York. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1990.

Untitled (Rock Garden I), Gravel, foraged media, canvas on panel, 92 x 74 x 1 1/2 inches
Untitled (detail, Rock Garden II), Gravel, bone, canvas on panel, 84 x 54 x 1 1/2 inches
Untitled (PPE Field), 2020, Foraged used gloves, mixed media, canvas on panel, 92 x 74 x 1 1/2 inches

Geoffrey Moss

Geoffrey Moss defines himself as “… simply a working New York artist”; painter, photographer of motorcycle culture (The Biker Code), former art restorer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, syndicated captionless political satirist of MOSSPRINTS, conceptual illustrator, children’s book author, set designer, essayist and university teacher.

Ultimately all my work is about drawing…the purity of drawing in both paintings and works on paper. Over time, the work has become comfortably less representational, focusing more on the reduction of shapes, forms to reflect the interaction of color, the energy of paint; the way the paint – the physicality of painting — documents the personal dialogue of spontaneous movement, finding form as a visual statement as in the architecture of water.  It’s about my dedication to the anatomy of shapes I arrange and rearrange. I work in series, a process beginning with sufficient numbers of drawings to continue idea-to-canvas. My lexicon stems from restrictions of the Bauhaus, 18th C. erotic Japanese prints, Russian Constructivism, religious symbols, Chinese medicine labels and vintage comic books. Experience confirms my personal truth, that art begets art, feeding a compulsion to generate and continue the dance.

I received Pulitzer Prize nominations for MOSSPRINTS, (Watergate and 9/11) resulting in the publication of a collection of my early works, The Art and Politics of Geoffrey Moss, as well as an invitation to paint Bus with White Walls for the Smithsonian Institution exhibition In the Spirit of Martin.

Moss holds degrees from The University of Vermont (B.A., Distinguished Alumnus) and Yale School of Art and Architecture (B.F.A., M.F.A.).

Shimmering Water Series: Beach Blanket, 2011, 36″ x36″, Oil on Canvas. Gensler New York Project
Black Drawing Series: Brief Encounter, 2015, 15″ x 13″, dry pigment and waxes on Stonehenge paper

 

Bus With White Walls, 2003, 30″ x 40″, Oil on Canvas. Smithsonian Institution, In The Spirit of Martin exhibition

Reaksmey Yean

H.R.H. (His Rebel/Revolt Highness) The Articurizer (Art[ist] Curator, Articulator/Writer, Researcher, and Art Advocate)

A native of Battambang, Reaksmey Yean is a self-proclaimed art advocate, an early-career art curator, writer, and researcher. Currently, he is a program director and co-founder of Silapak Trotchaek Pneik, a contemporary art space by YK Art House. He is also a part-time lecturer at Phnom Penh International Institute of the Art (PPIIA).

Yean is an Alphawood scholar (SOAS, the University of London for Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art – in Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian Art). He was an exchange scholar at the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs, Chiang Mai University. He is an inaugural SEAsia Award Scholar (2017) of LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, an Asian Cultural Council fellow (2018), and a beneficiary of Dr. Karen Mcleod Adair grant for MA in Asian Art Histories at LASALLE College of the Arts.

Yean was a curator for creative programs at Java Creative Café, Phnom Penh. Prior, he served several senior posts, including an Assistant to School of Performing Arts, at Phare Ponleu Selpak, a multi-disciplinary arts center, where he received his early education. He is also a founding father of a defunct collective named Trotchaek Pneik, a cultural and artistic collective based in Battambang.

Yean is interested in multi-disciplinary practices (Film, Visual, and Performing Arts). As an Art Advocate, Yean is involved in the promotion of art and culture and their histories within contemporary Cambodia via curatorial practices, art criticism, and cultural pundit. As a scholar, Yean is concerned with Buddhist Arts, Contemporary and Modern Arts, Southeast Asia, Cultural Diplomacy, and Post-colonial theory.

The books mentioned in the interview were: Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, Of Grammatology, and The Truth in Painting.

Umico Niwa

Peat Szilagyi and Umico Niwa

Umico Niwa is currently residing in Richmond Virginia, having just received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University. She recently had a solo show, Fruiting Bodies, at the American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings in Tucson, Arizona. She has also been invited to lead a workshop, together with her partner, “Meet Your Gremlin, Make Your Gremlin” at Recess Gallery in Brooklyn, New York City. Umico and Peat will be having a joint show, Solar Coochie, at the end of this month at Holding Contemporary, Portland, Oregon.

Niwa’s practice explores the way Western notions of personhood subsume human life into constructs of sexuality and gender, overlooking the various other modes of unbridled existence: plant, microbial. fungal, animal, celestial bodies. Her speculative medical papers propose novel forms of body modification to combat gender dysphoria as well as playfully explore the possible efficacy of including fecal matter transplants as part of hormone replacement therapy for transgender individuals.

Collaborative work made for the show, Solar Coochie
Collaborative solar powered work made for the show, Solar Coochie, “Moon in the Spoon” being tested.

Jamie Martinez

Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space

Colombian / American artist Jamie Martinez immigrated to Florida at the age of twelve from South America. He attended The Miami International University of Art and Design then moved to New York to continue his fine art education at The Fashion Institute of Technology and The Students Art League in NYC.

He is the publisher of Arte Fuse, which is a contemporary art platform focused on art shows that are currently on display, interviews and studio visits with today’s top artists from NY and all over the world. He is also the founder and director of The Border Project Space, which was recently featured in Hyperallergic’s top 15 shows of 2018.

Jamie’s work has been featured in multiple important outlets like a half-hour personal TV interview with NTN24 (Nuestra Tele Noticias, a major Spanish TV channel) for their show Lideres (translation leaders), Hyperallergic, Yale University radio WYBCX (radio interview), Whitehot Magazine, Good Day New York (TV interview),  Fox News (TV interview), The Observer, Whitewall Magazine, Interview Magazine, CNN, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Bedford + Bowery, and many more. Martinez has shown in Berlin, Brussels, Spain, Russia, Canada, Miami, California, and numerous galleries in New York City including Petzel Gallery, Galerie Richard, Whitebox NY, The Gabarron Foundation, Flowers Gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC, Foley Gallery, Rush Gallery and many more. He also participated in a group show curated by Vida Sabbaghi at the Queens Museum which was very well received by the museum and the press.

Liminality curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space, installation
The border project space curated by Jamie Martinez installation
Verge curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space

Desi Mundo

Desi Mundo was interviewed last year, and is an Oakland-based spray paint educator, hip-hop cultural diplomat and the founder of the Community Rejuvenation Project, a pavement to policy mural organization that has produced more than 250 murals, throughout the Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally. His mural with Pancho Peskador, the “Universal Language” galvanized the Oakland community in the struggle against gentrification resulting in $20 million in community benefits, as documented in the acclaimed documentary film “Alice Street.” Desi’s legacy as an educator and youth worker in K-12 schools spans two decades. He received the “Rising Leaders” Fellowship from the Youth Leadership Institute in 2005 and has been awarded the Individual Artist grant from the City of Oakland eight times. Desi recently completed “AscenDance,” a 91 ft. tall acrylic mural on Oakland’s Greenlining Institute, with an all-woman all-star team of brush painters.

Greg de Cuir Jr

photo by Ephraim Asili

Greg de Cuir Jr is an independent curator, writer and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia.

 

 

 

 

 

Yowshien Kuo

Yowshien Kuo was educated in both the U.S. and Taiwan and completed his MFA in 2014 from Fontbonne University. Kuo is an active exhibiting artist living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a co-owner of the artist run space, Monaco and has recently exhibited with Superdutchess in NYC, LVL3 Chicago, Terrain Exhibitions, Granite City’s Art and Design District, Projects Plus in St. Louis, and Counterpublic with The Luminary in St. Louis. Yowshien has been an artist in residence with Paul ArtSpace in St. Louis, a recipient of Regional Arts Commission support grant and Critical Mass for the Visual Arts award. His work has appeared in publications that include New American Paintings and The Seen Journal Chicago. He currently holds teaching appointments at St. Louis Community College at Meramec, Washington University’s – University College, and Maryville University in St. Louis.

The books mentioned in the interview are Hitler’s American Model by James Q. Whitman and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.


Yowshien Kuo But Victor Denies the Similarities Between Himself and the Monster Acrylic, gouache, chalk, Carrara marble, bone ash, and glass on canvas 2019 28” X 30”
Yowshien Kuo Slipped in Hope Acrylic, gouache, chalk, Carrara marble, bone ash, and glass on canvas 2020 29” X 30”