Brainard Carey's Blog, page 63

Harry Moritz

In my work, I use manufacturing to reflect on human-machine dynamics, sexuality and gender queerness. I think about how the workforces’ relationship to their machinery lacks heartfelt conscious reflection. Personality and machinery are often separate. I challenge this, making work that shows how humanity, personal identity and machinery can be a reflection of one another. Human sexuality and machine movements are similar in their dynamics and relationships. In my latest body of work, I use my lathe to produce phallic objects that explore gender queer motifs relating to the machinery I work with and my own sexual expression. My work sifts through old places in our culture.Factories that have seen many years and parts made.

After attending Pratt Institute for sculpture, I received my Machinist Certificate from Housatonic College in Bridgeport CT. My interest in machine work is the catalyst for how I understand the world. Time was always an interest that I would express in mechanical terms. Eventually I began making clocks out of aluminum discs. Then I was in the group exhibition, Horology at Jack Hanley Gallery in 2019. My studio is in Brooklyn, NY, where I have a machine shop to produce my work. Crossdressing is something I have been getting into lately. Exploring femininity has been very expansive for my work. I am more in touch with who I am, which is inspiring me to make work that I’ve never made before.

Note – here is the link to the online show mentioned in the interview.
Also, here is a link to the book mentioned in the interview.



Aqueous (May 2020)
Bottle Butt Plugs (April 2020)

Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.

Her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She has received awards from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Anderson Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Poets House, Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman and lives in Brooklyn.

Philip Metres

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015).

His work has garnered a Guggenheim, a Lannan, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Christal Brown

photo by Jonathan Hsu

Christal Brown has the distinction of being many things. She endorses a short list of these attributes that includes the titles mother, artist, educator, disciple and coach. Brown is most well known as a dancer and choreographer due to her 20+ year career as a performer and artistic director. Brown describes herself as a person with a servant heart and a workaholic mind, who has used dance to touch and be touched by others. Brown grew up in a small, Eastern North Carolina town, where she frequently accompanied her mother to NAACP, Black Caucus, and community board meetings. This early exposure to social movements and communal responsibility undoubtedly has influenced Brown’s work both on and off stage.

As an undergraduate, Brown studied Dance and Business at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Upon graduation, she went on to tour nationally and internationally with companies such as Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones, Chuck Davis, and Liz Lerman before founding her own company, INSPIRIT.

Brown has served as the Founding Artistic Director of INSPIRIT for 16 years. During her tenure Brown developed curriculum for the New York Department of Education, choreographed over 75 performance works, created the Liquid Strength training module for dance, and the Project: BECOMING, self-development program for women and girls.  While developing INSPIRIT Brown completed her MFA in New Media Art and Technology at Long Island University and joined the faculty of Middlebury College in 2008. At Middlebury, Brown serves as an Associate professor  of dance, the current chair of the Dance Program and former Faculty Director of MiddCORE.

Her dance career has continued to thrive in performances with the Bebe Miller Company, and her most recent choreographic works; The Opulence of Integrity and What We Ask of Flesh. Brown’s newest manifestation of love is Steps and Stages Coaching, LLC; where as a Life Mastery Consultant, certified by the BraveThinking Institute, Brown is able to coach, facilitate, and inspire other to pursue their dreams and create a life they truly love living.

photo by Jonathan Hsu. The Project Becoming Box  by Tayler Goodwin

Matthew Langley

Matthew Langley received his BFA from Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC in 1985. Since then, Langley’s work has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe through numerous group and solo exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include; Big Circle at M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kiev, In Color at Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA and The Unified Field at Blank Space, New York, NY. Langley’s artworks have also been included in various public and corporate collections including; the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage, and Construction, The Doris Patz Collection at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, Ernest and Young, PNC Bank, Saks Fifth Avenue, Norwegian Cruise Lines, MacAndrews & Forbes and the State Department of the United States. He currently lives and works in New York.

The Inky Blue, 2020, 48 x 48 inches, acrylic on canvas
Death / Life, 2019, One color screen print, edition of 15, 25 x 19 inches

Youssef Rakha

Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, essayist and poet who writes in both Arabic and English. Born, raised and based in Cairo, he graduated from Hull University, UK, in 1998, and has worked as a cultural journalist, literary translator and creative writing coach since then. He is the founding editor of the bilingual literary website тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ: Cairo’s coolest cosmopolitan hotel (sultansseal.com), named after his acclaimed first novel, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal (https://www.interlinkbooks.com/product/book-of-the-sultans-seal-the/). He can be found on therakha.net (therakha.net), on Twitter @Sultans_Seal (twitter.com/Sultans_Seal) and on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/YoussefRakha).

The poems he reads in the course of this conversation (translated by Robin Moger) can be found here (https://kgbbarlit.com/content/three-poems-2), and the essay he refers to in the context of the third poem here (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/angels-trail-seven-swiss-encounters/).

Andrew Schwartz

Andrew Schwartz’s practice explores the possibilities of abstract visual language using a vocabulary of color, form, light, and materiality. Collaborating with chance and the alchemical properties of paint, he employs a range of studio techniques in an improvisational flow of repetition and variation to create new visual outcomes.  Each painting becomes a site for impressions, residues, and subsequent excavations.

Schwartz’s recent work draws on the incidental beauty of daily visual experience, never discriminating between the monumental and the mundane. His paintings also allude to those microscopic and macroscopic abstract worlds brought into focus through the aid of technology. In an age flooded with ephemeral images all vying for attention, Schwartz is particularly interested in the role of painting as a format that demands patience and slow, intimate looking from its audience.

Andrew Schwartz received a BFA with concentrations in painting and sculpture from Cornell University in 2010 and an MFA in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2016. Schwartz has exhibited his artwork at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC); Deanna Evans Projects (NYC); and Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA); among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Andrew Schwartz “Golem (Blue/Red)”, 2020, 30 x 22 inches, Oil, pigments, and mica on archival paper
Andrew Schwartz, “Late Bloomer”, 2019, 30 x 22 inches, Oil and pigments on archival paper
Andrew Schwartz “Impressions: Green-Wood”, 2020, 30 x 22 inches, Oil, pigments, and mica on archival paper

 

Arthur Menezes Brum

Arthur Menezes Brum (b.1985) is an educator, artist, and consultant. His activities focus on interrogating creativity within and beyond the fine arts.

As an educator he seeks to reinforce the controversial concept that anyone can become an artist. He received his MFA from Yale University, and his BFA in from the University of Cincinnati.

 

Bad Idea in Orange, 2020.  Light bulb and dehydrated orange, ~12″x 3.5″ x 3.5″
Ash Canary, 2020. Hand sanitizer on painted cardboard effigy, ~ 5″ x 4″ x 3″
Alien Space Suit, 2020. Performance/Costume: Seersucker suit, N95 respirator, goggles, sunglasses, gloves, boat shoes, and latex mask.

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Steve Rand, Lu, and Baci

apexart is a not-for-profit art space in Lower Manhattan. Founded by artist Steven Rand in 1994, it was conceived to challenge ideas about art, its practice and curation, and to provide opportunity through meritocratic processes. apexart realizes this mission through exhibitions, an international residency program, a book publishing initiative, and public programs. To date it has worked with over 1,800 artists from around the world in its exhibition and residency programs. 2013 marked the publication of apexart’s fourth book, Life Between Borders: The Nomadic Life of Curators and Artists, a collection of essays on the affect of travel and nomadism in the art world. apexart has exhibited 200 exhibitions and hosted over 150 residencies in New York City and around the world.

Presenting nine shows annually, apexart’s exhibition program seeks to put new people in the position of curator through three different initiatives: the invited curator series, Unsolicited Proposal Program, and Franchise Program.

Each year, apexart presents two exhibitions organized by invited individuals, three exhibitions selected through the Unsolicited Proposal Program, and four exhibitions selected from the Franchise Program. These last two programs are open call curatorial opportunities that allow anyone from anywhere to propose an exhibition to be presented by apexart at its Tribeca location (in the case of the Unsolicited Proposal Program), or elsewhere in the world (in the case of the Franchise Program).

Past invited curators include: David Bianculli, Leah Buechley, Rob Walker, Simon Critchley, David Byrne, Boris Groys, and Dave Eggers. Past Unsolicited Proposal Winners include: Alastair Noble (2014), Avi Lubin (2014), Martin Waldmeier (2013), Natalie Musteata (2012), Gary Fogelson and Michael Hutcherson (2011), Courtenay Finn (2010), and Sandra Skurvida (2009). Past Franchise winners include: Mike Crane (Palestine, 2014), Chuong-Dai Vo (Cambodia, 2014), Paul Falzone and Marisa Jahn (Uganda 2013), Katharina Rhode (South Africa, 2012), Corina Oprea, Isabel Löfgren, Judith Souriau, Milena Placentile, and Valerio Del Baglivo (Sweden, 2011), and Logan Bay (Thailand, 2010).

The apexart Residency is an alternative educational program that invites creative professionals to leave their familiar surroundings for a month-long stay in a foreign country. Inbound Residents travel to New York, while Outbound Residents are sent from New York to locations including Ethiopia, Thailand, and Brazil.

apexart provides each resident with a detailed schedule of daily activities, meetings, and unexpected new experiences designed to provide creative and professional development The program is a geographical, historical, and intellectual exploration that combines the high and the low, art and non-art, and the mundane with the extraordinary and seeks to catalyze ideas for future work. Participants—from different disciplines and at different points in their career—are recommended by noted individuals from their home country who believe their practice could benefit from a non-working visit to a foreign country.

apexart’s publishing program examines timely issues in contemporary art and culture with new essays by members of the field from around the world.

In 2006, apexart published its first book, On Cultural Influence: Collected Papers from apexart International Conferences. This book, a compilation of essays presented at three apexart Conferences, offers a unique perspective of international viewpoints of the changing cultural landscape. Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, published in 2007, asked academics, writers, and curators to consider how the proliferation of ‘cultural producers’ has changed the definition, evolution, and purpose of the curator over the last ten years. Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces, published in 2010, addresses the perceived rules of the development and running of alternative spaces, and where those rules came from. The book provides new inspiration and fresh perspectives for those working in these spaces.

Randy Rollison

Randy’s job is to provide the overarching vision and direction for Intersection for the Arts, which includes finding new ways to support artists.

With over thirty years experience as an artistic director, he co-founded New York City’s HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art and HERE Arts Center, served as the executive artistic director for Cleveland Public Theatre, and has a long career as an actor and director in NYC and regionally.

He joined Intersection for the Arts in 2008 and became Executive Director in 2015. When he’s not keeping the trains running at Intersection, you can find him cooking adventurous meals, traveling, researching his family tree, or working (at a snail’s pace) on his memoirs.

The book mentioned in the interview is Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1.

Dancing Earth is an Indigenous dance company that aims to inspire creativity, grow cultural consciousness, and support Indigenous dance.Intersection for the Arts is a historic arts and culture nonprofit that provides Bay Area based artists and arts organizations with fiscal sponsorship, resources, space, and support to grow their artistic practices.
Red Poppy Art House is an artistic and cultural center and venue in the historic San Francisco Mission district. They host diverse performances, exhibitions, workshops, and artist residencies that creatively address social, political, and community issues.Intersection for the Arts is a historic arts and culture nonprofit that provides Bay Area based artists and arts organizations with fiscal sponsorship, resources, space, and support to grow their artistic practices.