Brainard Carey's Blog, page 66

Natasha Ria El-Scari

Natasha Ria El-Scari is long known for being an acclaimed local poet, writer, feminist, and educator but in this offering, her third book, she takes a sharp turn to lean into not only non-fiction but also motherhood. Mama Sutra is an opening to over 15 years of conversation about lovemaking that she has had with her son. The focus: being present with the woman and not focused specifically on the male orgasm. It includes advice about how to prepare the body and personal space for lovemaking, communication and contemplation to liberate long standing taboos within the African American community and beyond.

This book is the perfect gift for a young man entering young adulthood, for single men who wants to make sure he is ready for lovemaking or a married man that needs a refresher course. Natasha gives not only practical advice but the real “mother wit” wisdom of what many women are looking for in a lover from a black feminist perspective. Mama Sutra is long overdue, it provides an opening for families and lovers to have conversations that have never occurred but that we all desperately need to be having with our sons and women with their lovers. Mama Sutra is just in time for the holidays, semester breaks and the rest of their lives. Don’t delay and purchase today from the writer, or purchase it on amazon here.

Nicole Schmöelzer

Nicole Schmöelzer works with oil paint and ink. Her intuitive, abstract imagery emerges out of the dynamics and the organic flow of the fluid paint, in which gravitation, sedimentation and other process-oriented approaches are in play. The distinctive characteristics of her work lie in a play and counter-play of intention and chance, suggestive rhythms, as well as of an attractive-repulsive aspect as they are revealed in the creative process and its becoming.

Her paintings grow and develop rhythmically over time, giving visible form to natural phenomena as known in our cyclical, suggestive and paradoxical reality: (an extract of her new publication: Imbuing, Modo Publisher.

“With painting I am pursuing an approach to the real which is not necessarily visible or depicted as such. I have followed the motivation for abstraction, the inner impulse, a life rhythm, a movement or an energy which underlie the tides of life and human growth. To translate this into painting, to represent and incorporate the flowing, to catch the subtle movement of the changeable, to set one’s sights on in-between state (describable through an observation from the inside); the stillness in the flow—all this becomes the content of a painting for me as a painter and observer.”

Nicole Schmöelzer is from Switzerland and has been painting since 1995 in her studios in Basel and New York. She was introduced to painting at an early age through the art school Martenot (1975-88) and completed pedagogical studies at Martenot in Paris in 1988-89. Since 1995 her work has been regularly shown at different galleries and exhibition spaces in Europe, the United States and Japan. She has received grants for artist residencies from the Art OMI Foundation NY, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center in California and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation in Maine.

She has also worked with site-specific art and architecture realizations (Basel, 2014), as well as with projection-performance-projects involving animated painting (experimental video).

For more information on the interdisciplinary project mentioned in the interview, click here.

Imbuing 39×31.5 inches, oil, ink, linen.
Staining, 70×60 inches, oil, ink, linen.
Studio, 2020

Nicole Schmölzer

Nicole Schmölzer works with oil paint and ink. Her intuitive, abstract imagery emerges out of the dynamics and the organic flow of the fluid paint, in which gravitation, sedimentation and other process-oriented approaches are in play. The distinctive characteristics of her work lie in a play and counter-play of intention and chance, suggestive rhythms, as well as of an attractive-repulsive aspect as they are revealed in the creative process and its becoming.

Her paintings grow and develop rhythmically over time, giving visible form to natural phenomena as known in our cyclical, suggestive and paradoxical reality: (an extract of her new publication: Imbuing, Modo Publisher.

“With painting I am pursuing an approach to the real which is not necessarily visible or depicted as such. I have followed the motivation for abstraction, the inner impulse, a life rhythm, a movement or an energy which underlie the tides of life and human growth. To translate this into painting, to represent and incorporate the flowing, to catch the subtle movement of the changeable, to set one’s sights on in-between state (describable through an observation from the inside); the stillness in the flow—all this becomes the content of a painting for me as a painter and observer.”

Nicole Schmölzer is from Switzerland and has been painting since 1995 in her studios in Basel and New York. She was introduced to painting at an early age through the art school Martenot (1975-88) and completed pedagogical studies at Martenot in Paris in 1988-89. Since 1995 her work has been regularly shown at different galleries and exhibition spaces in Europe, the United States and Japan. She has received grants for artist residencies from the Art OMI Foundation NY, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center in California and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation in Maine.

She has also worked with site-specific art and architecture realizations (Basel, 2014), as well as with projection-performance-projects involving animated painting (experimental video).

Imbuing 39×31.5 inches, oil, ink, linen.
Staining, 70×60 inches, oil, ink, linen.
Studio, 2020

Duane Michals

Duane Michals is an artist with an exhibition at the time of this interview at The Morgan Library as well as DC Moore Gallery.

He has published numerous books throughout his lifetime, and many of them can be seen and bought here.

YORT from Duane Michals on Vimeo.

The End from Duane Michals on Vimeo.

Adam de Boer

Adam de Boer graduated with a BA in Painting from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art, London (2012). Recent exhibitions include Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018/2016); Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles (2018); World Trade Centre, Jakarta (2018); Art|Jog, Yogyakarta (2018/2015); Redbase Foundation, Yogyakarta (2017); Riflemaker, London (2016/2013/2011); Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, Yogyakarta (2014); University of California, Santa Barbara (2014); Escuela Taller, Bogotá (2013); Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC (2010).

In 2017, de Boer was awarded a Fulbright research fellowship to Indonesia. Other grants include those from Arts for India, The Cultural Development Corporation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and The Santa Barbara Arts Fund.

For the past seven years de Boer has travelled throughout Indonesia to investigate his Eurasian heritage. His recent work employs imagery and traditional crafts from the region as a way to connect his artistic practice with those of his distant cultural forebears. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Fool’s Cap Map of the World, 2019, wax-resist acrylic paint washes and crayon on linen 30 x 40 inches
Monday Evening Studio View, 2020, wax-resist acrylic paint washes and crayon on linen 92 x 120 inches
Detail: Monday Evening Studio View, 2020, wax-resist acrylic paint washes and crayon on linen 92 x 120 inches

Margaret Keller

Margaret Keller’s large-scale installations are concerned with the impact of humans and technology on the survival of all interdependent species on earth, as we stumble into the future.  Issues she addresses include speculative possibilities for planetary  and species survival, climate change, natural disasters, gender, surveillance, and our experience of nature in this digital age.

Using diverse media such as installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, laser-cutting,

3-D printing, video, and mixed-media, all her series share an investigation into the relationships between nature, contemporary culture, and technology, recognizing these relationships as now negatively symbiotic.  Keller’s series come from her sense that at this precise moment, we are at the tipping point of a world gone wrong.  Her installation Botanica absentia was at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis for Fall 2019 and travels in 2020 to The Mitchell Museum in Illinois as part of her one-person exhibition Leaning on Nature.  Thousands of earth’s plant and animal species are under eminent threat of extinction now; Botanica absentia is a memorial to lost species – set 70 years in the future.

Keller also focuses on the curatorial and critical aspects of contemporary art, with reviews published in Art in America, delicious line, All the Art, and temporaryartreview among others, and numerous exhibitions curated at The Meramec Contemporary Art Gallery.

Keller’s art has been shown in over fifty galleries, museums and collections including The Arkansas Art Center Museum in Little Rock, the RAC gallery in St. Louis, The Mitchell Museum in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, The Center for Contemporary Art and Gallery 210 in St. Louis and Quadratfuß/NX2-Annex Art in Berlin.  In 2018, she was commissioned to create Riverbend, a 133-foot-long aluminum public art installation representing the Missouri River at The Gateway Arch National Park.  The Space Between was at The William and Florence Schmidt Art Center in 2019, where her laser-cut sculpture was selected for the permanent collection.  Currently she is the Artist-in-Residence at Forsyth School.

Keller has worked full-time as Professor of Art at Meramec College in St. Louis; she was also Visiting Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and in Florence, Italy; Historic Preservation Consultant; Fiscal Analyst for the Missouri State Legislature; self-employed cake decorator; and box factory worker.

Studies include Post-Graduate work in Experimental Electronic Media (video game design, animation) at Webster University, Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, and Bachelor of Arts from University of Missouri-Columbia.

The book mentioned in the interview was

Link to the book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.

The Aternative Spaces mentioned in the interview are – Monaco Founded by 12 member artists and G-CADD (Granite City Art & Design District) and STNDRD (flagpole gallery) and The Luminary.

Botanica absentia, 2019, aluminum, chrome, stainless steel, dichroic plexiglass, holographic vinyl, wood, at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Photo: Josh Rowan

Studio Window: Disaster Series, 30×22”, graphite and watercolor on Arches Paper, The Mitchell Museum, 2020 Photo: Margaret Keller

Tannaz Farsi

Tannaz Farsi’s practice straddles sculpture, installation and image making allowing her to work within a serial structure to create interdependencies in meaning. She uses organic materials such as flowers and plants, creates spatial compositions from light, air, words and continually engages with the history and specificity of objects to critically address broader socio-political systems through both an analytical and poetic framework. Farsi’s research draws from historic cultural objects, feminist histories, and theories of displacement evidenced by long standing colonialist and authoritarian interventions into daily life to complicate the network of relations around conception of memory, history, identity and geography.

Farsi’s work has been exhibited at venues including SFAC Galleries, San Francisco; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Disjecta Art Center, Portland; Linfield Gallery McMinnville, ; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; and The Sculpture Center, Cleveland. She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Studios at Mass MOCA, Santa Fe Art Institute and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her work has been supported through grants and awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, University of Oregon and the Ford Family Foundation. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014 and was named the twenty-eighth Bonnie Bronson Fellow in 2019. Born in Iran, Farsi lives and works in Eugene, OR where she is on the faculty at the University of Oregon.

The Names [state III], 2019, powder coated steel
Tyrrany stops life., 2109, Iranian rug, silica grit, aluminum, archival ink jet print, polyester film, dried tulip petals

Steven L. Bridges

Steven L. Bridges, photo by Eat Pomegranate Photography

Steven L. Bridges is a curator, art historian, and writer based in Lansing, Michigan. Currently he holds the position of Associate Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU Broad). His present research and curatorial interests focus on the intersection of social, racial, and environmental justice, as well as the relationship between art, geopolitics, and scientific inquiry. Most recently at the MSU Broad, Bridges curated the major exhibitions Katrín Sigurðardóttir (2019–20) and Oscar Tuazon: Water School (2019), and co-curated the first two-person exhibition of the work of Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, titled Michigan Stories (2017–18). Other notable projects include Spirit Molecule (2019), a highly experimental project initiated by artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Phillip Andrew Lewis to develop a moss garden of genetic memorials; and Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint, a residency project for which artist Jan Tichy worked with Lansing and Flint-area community members in response to the Flint water crisis. His essays and articles have been published in numerous journals and magazines, including Seismopolite, Art & the Public Sphere, Dispatch, Live Arts Almanac, and Art & Education Papers, as well as exhibition catalogues and other online and print media. In 2017 he was named a curatorial fellow at the FACE Foundation.

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, photo Courtesy MSU Broad
Katrín Sigurðardóttir installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2019. Photo: Eat Pomegranate Photography.

Kat Larson

Kat Larson defines herself as a healer, seer, seeker, and human and is devoted to exploring universal energy and awareness through her healing art practice.

Kat is a reiki master, qigong student, intuitive guide, and creative.

She is committed to providing healing to her community via her practice, which also includes her art that spans across plastic and digital surfaces. All relationships and artifacts of her practice are examples of communication between Conduit and Source.

They Pray For Us ( The Ghost at Standing Rock), Archival Ink Jet print on Moab Paper, 18” x 24”, 2016
Untitled, Still from Video Painting, Variable dimensions, Loop, 2019

Roger Wing

Self-portrait mask, Fir, 2000

Roger Wing was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1968, the middle child of two educators. He studied at UC Santa Cruz, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Montana.

As well as carving wood, his primary medium, Wing has travelled the world carving ice, snow and sand. Among the most influential experiences of Wing’s life were five weeks spent in Japan studying Buddhist and traditional wood carvings and two summers learning to carve marble in the studio of Manuel Neri, in Carrara, Italy. Wing’s family, home and studio are in West Philadelphia where he is part of a vibrant arts community.

The Othering of Eve, Paulownia, 2019


Sculpting ice at Changchun World Sculpture Park, 2018.