Artist Decoded by Yoshino

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Jeffrey Martin Zacks, American psychology educator, member of the American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society, and the Cognitive Science Society. His book, Flicker: Your Brain on Movies, delves into the history of cinema and the latest research to explain what happens in your brain when you sit down in the theatre and the lights go out.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• How the brain helps us think perceive and aid us in solving problems
• Mirror neurons
• The impact that film has on it's viewers
• Mimicking attributes of the brain and how it specifically helps us in daily life
• Film perception
• Evoking and implementing cues for specific responses within films
• "The willing suspension of belief"
• Kids viewing violent films and how it affects them when they are adults
• Mindset and engagement
• Age and films
• Neuroplasticity
• The "nimble brain"
• The brain's development and how we can shift the way we think in order to retain a greater amount of plasticity
• Movies and the brain's correspondence with what we are visualizing
• "Feeling" what we are viewing
• Creating plots and narratives that affect your emotion
• The power of non-analytical effects
• The documentary "The Social Dilemma", and Jeff's views on the way technology is progressing
• "What are you subscribing to?"
• Children and social media
• Reflecting on how we use social media and how it influences our brain and habits

www.artistdecoded.com

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Self-taught, David Uzochukwu (b. 1998, Austria) creates (self-)portraits that speak of both placelessness and belonging. His work sees bodies shifting through nature, performance, and digital reconfiguration. Uzochukwu's photographs have been exhibited at Bozar, Photo Vogue Festival, and Unseen Amsterdam. He has collaborated with artists FKA twigs, Pharrell, and Iris Van Herpen, and received commissions by Dior and Hermès. Since 2019, he is a participant of CPH:DOX's talent development program. British Journal of Photography named him One to Watch in 2020. He currently lives in Berlin, where he pursues his first degree in philosophy.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• David's development and obsession with photography
• Looking at other photographers work and being inspired
• Distraction and aesthetic within David's work
• Emotions and the expression of an image
• David's photography process
• Finding your signature approach
• Navigating your youth, and standing your ground
• Leaning into your intuition
• Organic transition within artwork
• Simplicity
• Swallowing your feelings and fighting to have your needs met
• Finding your artistic voice and rooting yourself within that
• David's interest in philosophy
• Ethics and practical reasoning for the things that you do
• Aesthetics being used as a "glazing" to your art
• Masculinity and the roles of gender
• Strength and vulnerability
• Futurism
• Getting to the point of reflecting your opinions within your art
• Bias
• The future for Davids self-portraiture and photography

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www.instagram.com/daviduzochukwu/

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Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz are both directors and writers, known for Antebellum (2020), Rapture, and 17 Seventeen (2017).

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Required solitude
• Shifting perspective within a paradigm
• Truth
• Bush and Renz's collaboration and how that has evolved
• Acceptance of failures and misfortunes
• The process of working together within relationships
• Discovery within the arts
• Companionship within the process of creating
• The process of trusting your art
• Spiritualism
• The collective consciousness
• Inspiration and how an artist taps into it
• Leaving behind a legacy
• When to put on and shed your ego
• Being afraid to feel something
• The emotion felt while filming Antebellum
• Social change
• The foundations and future of America

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Christopher's Instagram

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About Justin: Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade, and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.

In his recent solo show, his works create paradoxical beauty in the landscape of oppression and violence around the world. With the Covid-19 pandemic and the escalating racial conflict, Justin Mortimer's solo exhibition sets the stage for reflection on the 'tomorrow' of our society. Show Notes:

• 0:00:00 - Introduction
• 0:04:52 - Paradoxical Psychological Truth in Work
• 0:08:34 - Feeling Like An Outsider & Childhood Stories
• 0:12:57 - Balloons as Proxy For The Body & Learning Figurative Painting
• 0:17:06 - Painting Latex, Dysmorphia, and Masks
• 0:20:22 - BP Portrait Award and Learning and Unlearning Portrait Painting
• 0:24:25 - Digital Collaging The Overlooked Imagine
• 0:29:23 - Not Knowing When Paintings Are Done
• 0:32:54 - Empathy With People Diametrically Opposing Views
• 0:37:19 - New Meanings of Paintings Included in Solo Show "Tomorrow"
• 0:42:53 - COVID-19 Struggles
• 0:46:40 - "The Social Dilemma" by Jeff Orlowski and No More Truth
• 0:48:54 - Past Generations and "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" by Werner Herzog
• 0:54:02 - Decoding The Everyday Object
• 0:58:03 - Meanings Transform Over Time
• 1:02:11 - Painting David Bowie and Expectations of Portrait Painting
• 1:15:15 - Wrap Up

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About Mike: Mike Lee is a world-ranked professional boxer who has fought in some of the world's most iconic arenas like Madison Square Garden, Cowboys Stadium & The MGM Grand in front of millions of fans. In 2014 Mike was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis, that almost ended his career. In and out of hospitals for over two years he became tired of all the medications and treatments. Mike began searching for all-natural alternatives which lead him to discover CBD and all of its incredible physical and mental benefits! Using his background in finance and business, Mike felt that creating Soul CBD would be the perfect way to share his knowledge while helping others to defeat whatever battles with the pain they may be facing.

Columbia Tatone is an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer. Known for her dynamic cinematic action and relational, relevant storytelling, she often features unique elements of sci-fi in her work. Tatone studied Jazz at Berklee's College of Music in Boston and later received her Business degree at Vanguard University. As a commercial, music video, and narrative director, Columbia empowers her audience through eye-popping, thought-provoking action sequences. As a champion for women and the underrepresented, Tatone often uses her work to promote social justice while also taking us into different realities that highlight the emotional scar tissue of life. Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Fight and flight mode
• The state of flow
• The fullness of living out your destiny
• Mike's early stages of boxing
• Performing with gratitude and happiness
• Mike's autoimmune illness
• Empathy and wellness
• Grit
• Eastern Medicine
• Looking at pain as a gift
• Mind over body
• Reprogramming of your mind
• How COVID has put everyone on an equal playing field
• Identity
• Mike's work with his company "Soul CBD"

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Columbia's Instagram

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About Edon: Edon Guraziu specializes in Concept Design & Consultation. These various industries range from Entertainment, Industrial, Defense, Medical, Consumer Products, and more. Many years of collaboration have resulted in meaningful relationships with the following companies, some of which include: 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Microsoft, Netflix, NVIDIA, MPC, Method Studios, JBC Safety Plastic Inc., StrikerVR, TheVRCompany, Swiss Federal Railways, and more.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Upbringing and immigrating
• Not allowing fear to inhibit productivity
• Logic and emotion
• Age and skills
• Movies and their influence
• Mentors and relationships
• Being present, here and now
• Decision making and their ripple effect
• Valuing yourself, your art, and your business
• Art and business
• Stoicism & identity of work
• Work, failure, and recontextualizing

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Edon's Website

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About Jesse: Jesse Draxler was born in rural Wisconsin, studied in Minneapolis, MN, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. A formal mixed media & inter-disciplinary artist, Draxler has exhibited extensively both domestically and internationally. Draxler had solo exhibitions in New York at the Booth Gallery in 2017 and 2016, and has been in exhibitions across Europe at galleries in Munich, London, Paris, Hamburg, and Berlin. Draxler collaborates with brands including Hugo Boss, McQ Alexander McQueen, and Ferrari, with original artwork appearing in Elle, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• The path of friendship
• The intentionality behind social media
• Thinking about the motivations behind what you are doing
• Dedication within your craft
• Artists relation to sports
• Mental fortitude and willpower
• The meaning behind Jesse's latest show, "Table of Losses"
• Letting artwork play itself out
• The payoff of patience
• The sense of urgency that comes with social media
• Having a sense of mental separation between yourself and your artistic practice
• Ego death
• Copying yourself and it equating to an artistic death
• Jesse continually re-inventing himself
• The emotional weight behind the artwork
• Taking criticism as an artist
• Modern and Post-Modern art
• Moral limits, and how art challenges your morals
• Finding inspirations within everyday life
• Jesse's music project "Reigning Cement"
• Jesse's "Love, hate" relationship with his environment
• Collaborative pieces of art being influenced by the environment
• The concept of a suffering artist
• Success and drive
• Understanding and creating from a place of purpose
• Setting goals within life

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Jesse's Website

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About Yasmine: Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Her recent work includes immersive installation, fiber etching, and mixed media collage using personal archives and found imagery.

Diaz has exhibited and performed at spaces including the Brava Theater in San Francisco, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, and the Torrance Art Museum. She is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2019) with works included in the collections of LACMA, UCLA, and the Arab American National Museum. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• The background behind the title of Yazmine's latest show "Soft Powers"
• The concept of "code-switching"
• Navigating different worlds within the world we live in
• Cultural differences Yazmine has experienced and how it has personally developed in her work
• Growing up within two different cultures and countries
• A nuanced discussion on arranged marriage and forced arranged marriage and the hardship that came with it
• Online dating and "matchmaking" and how it has affected our world
• Yasmine's journey to New Mexico
• Poverty, capitalism, and the disbursement of power
• Yazmine's current work and why she chose the 90s as a timepiece
• Engagement between the artist, the content, and the viewer
• The business of art and the complications that come with selling art
• "Social practice" of art
• The complicated reality of morals and ethics within different career fields
• The concept of death and knowing what you stand for
• Being intentional of why you want power and resources
• The dynamics between parents and children
• Subminimally thinking about art
• Yazmine's latest work
• Transforming style over time
• Authenticity

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Yasmine's Instagram

Yasmine's Website

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About Pádraig: Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and theologian from Ireland whose poetry and prose have been published widely across Ireland, the US, and the UK. He presents Poetry Unbound with On Being, a hugely successful podcast where he explores a single poem. Short and unhurried; contemplative and energizing, this podcast had more than a million downloads of its first season. The second season starts on the 28th of September. Mondays and Fridays for twelve weeks. Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• What Padraig's poem means to him, reflecting back on it
• Life being circular
• Padraig's writing process
• The beauty in the confluence of various things coming together
• Padraig's roots within writing poetry
• Embracing the flourishing of life
• Isolation within artists
• The "peasant poet"
• Cultural conflict
• Shelter and the shadow
• Leaning into self-discovery within our life
• Considering things that have been ingrained within us and actively challenging their purpose within our live
• Poetry being the unfolding of the unexpected
• Finding beauty within the imperfections
• Being interested in looking
• Meditation within daily life

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Pádraig's Website

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About Colin: Colin Frangicetto is a multidisciplinary visual artist, musician (Circa Survive & Psychic Babble), and podcaster (The Cosmic Nod). He lives and works in Portland, OR.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• The genesis of Circa Survive
• Colin's experiences with psychedelic drugs at an early age, and how it affected his view of life in both the present and future
• Empathy towards others
• Being present with an individual
• Lessons learned within political unrest
• Learning to intentionally listen to those who you disagree with
• "Being your own Buddha" and living the teachings you subscribe to
• Colin's journey with ayahuasca
• Intentions of reciprocity
• The concept of giving and taking
• Homelessness being on the rise within L.A. and Portland
• Giving your life to the arts
• Life as an artist
• The difficulty of not being able to tour throughout the COVID-19 pandemic
• Circa Survive's "rhythm of touring"
• An artists' work turning into a brand
• Being connected to yourself and being comfortable in your own skin
• Genuine artists and self-proclaimed artists

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Colin's Instagram

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