Interviews by Brainard Carey

Marleen Sleeuwits (NL), Multidisciplinary artist Marleen Sleeuwits, born in 1980 in Enschede, currently lives and works in The Hague. In 2001 she graduated from the Royal Academy of the Arts with a BA in photography, whereafter she obtained her MA in the same discipline at AKV|St. Joost in 2005.

Marleen Sleeuwits has been exhibiting solo and in group exhibitions, in The Netherlands and internationally. Her work has been shown in various exhibitions and art fairs such as: Royal Encounters, a group exhibition at Museum Escher in The Hague, Isomatrix, a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Rotterdam.This year she has two major exhibitions; one solo in the Centre Photographique in Rouen, France and a duo in Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in New York, U.S.A.

Sarah Lubin (Boston, MA) earned a B.A. in Art History from McGill University in 2001, followed by a year in Foundation Studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London).

She received an M.A. in Art History from Columbia University and an M.F.A. in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Lubin is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (2019 and 2021).

Frames is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Nancy Margolis Gallery.

Julie Severino is a Brooklyn based painter. She received her MFA from New York Academy of Art. Severino creates psychological narratives that function as a tool to deepen her understanding of the mind and body connection, in relation to her own personal history and the larger human experience.

Playing with perspective, her paintings depict disproportionate figures or things that are in dialogue with the multidimensional environments. Rendering parts of the work differently serves as a means to distinguish rhythm, stillness, force and sensitivity. Stillness and time are necessary to reveal parts of the enigmatic scenes.

The sculptures are made with various materials, such as, aluminum, magic sculpt, glass, paper, hair and other materials. The transition from painting to sculpture allows Severino to explore with her hands and body in a way that calls attention to an immersive visual language and way of creating.

Including poetry with some of the work is an important part of Severino’s studio practice. Often, the writing becomes the genesis of the paintings and sculptures, but sometimes, during the process of creating, the work will inspire the text that then becomes a part of the physical artwork.

Listen to Severino read her poetry here.

In 2008 he was proposed for a knighthood for his contribution to art in Britain by the Chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and others. In 2019 the British Library documented his career for the nation. In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in Wales published a biography of Povey’s life and work up to that point. In 2018 Povey studied Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna in the National Gallery in London, using Ghiotto’s and Raphael’s Verdaccio palette for his new paintings which he termed Emotional Realism. Between 2019 and 2023 Povey appeared in many publications and interviews  in Spain, Poland, the United States, Egypt, England, Italy, France and Brazil.

His paintings hang in museum collections, private and corporate collections in thirty countries. Since 2021 he has shown with Waterhouse & Dodd in New York. His current Solo Exhibition: “HUMAN”, 5th October – 3rd November 2023. 15 East 76th Street, New York, NY 10021. T: 212 717 9100.  Edward Povey is currently beginning a new collection of paintings in his studio in the Devon countryside of England.

Floria González was born in Monterrey on July 20th, 1980. She moved to Acuña Coahuila in 1983, eventually moving to Mexico City at 16 where she currently lives and works.

Floria’s dreamlike, cinematic scenes explore alternate realities and hidden layers of the psyche. Using photography, video, installation, performance, and painting, Floria maintains a constant dialogue between fantasy and imagination, excavating forms and scenes that reconstruct her own identity through memories and experiences.

Floria has exhibited work in Mexico City, Monterrey, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Berlin, Italy, Hong Kong, London, and Singapore.

Enemy Combatant, David Winner’s third novel (March 2021) received a Kirkus-starred review and was a Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Editor’s Pick.

He is the co-editor of Writing the Virus, a New York Times-noted Anthology. His Kirkus-recommended second novel, Tyler’s Last, was nominated for a Pushcart while his first, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions, The Kenyon Review and (in German) Manuskripte.

He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, and a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily  Master Lovers, a non-fiction work inspired by hidden love letters from the 1930’s, comes out in November.

Born in 1958 in Mexico City, Laura Anderson Barbata is a transdisciplinary artist, performer, writer, and educator who lives and works between New York and Mexico City. Since 1992 Anderson Barbata has worked primarily in the social realm, initiating projects in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States. Among them is the ongoing The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, begun in 2005, which resulted in the removal of the project’s titular figure’s body from the Schreiner Collection in Oslo, Norway and its successful repatriation and burial in Sinaloa, Mexico, Pastrana’s birth state. The project continues with Anderson Barbata’s production of related artworks, publications, zines, and performances.

Anderson Barbata is also known for her project Transcommunality (2001-present), presented in collaboration with stilt dancers, artists, and artisans from Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean. Transcommunality has been staged at various museums, schools, and other public spaces both as exhibitions and performance “Interventions.” Among them are Columbia University, New York (2023); The Watermill Center, Water Mill (2021); Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans (2021); MUCA Roma, UNAM, Mexico (2020); BRIC Arts | Media House, Brooklyn (2019); The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. (2019); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2017, 2018); Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2017); United Nations Plaza, New York (2017); University of Wisconsin, Madison (2015); Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Mexico (2012, 2016); The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2008); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007).

Mikael Levin explores our conceptions of place, identity and temporarily. His photographs are often of commonplace, everyday sites that, while seemingly insignificant in themselves, tie into larger historical events or movements of our times. By way of these places, his photographs form a topography of societal structures, predispositions, influences and memory.

A note on the Stono Rebellion image from the artist:  “Critical Places is essentially about how the rebellions of the enslaved are remembered (or not remembered) in the landscape. Through my witnessing of these places in my photographs, I am bringing forward how these rebellions still echo in social patterns and economic structures.  What we see the case of the Stono Rebellion is the emergence of the trope of the Black man as “feared, violent, irrational.” Other rebellions are early examples of how power controls information, excessive Police violence, the lack of the Black voice in the telling of our history, the minimization of the woman’s roll, and so on and so forth.“

Skuja Braden is a pseudonym & the surnames of International duo Ingūna Skuja (Latvia), & Melissa Braden (USA) working collectively & primarily with porcelain. Skuja Braden represents an “absence of presence” of an individual author, where two artists have combined forces creating a fictive and alternate proxy identity.

Collaboration is the non-hierarchical framework Skuja Braden utilize as method, strategy, and philosophy, exploring alternative relations to power through a fusion of disparate identities, inclinations, and perceptions. The work is conceptually based, but always expressed as a synthesis of painting & sculpture. Their works blend decorative, literary, and political elements into hybrid forms utilizing material that is historically associated with absolute refinement.

In 1932, Paulina Peavy (1901 – 1999) attended a séance at the home of Ida L. Ewing in Santa Ana, California, where she claims to have met a UFO named Lacamo, a spirit from another world. From that moment forward Peavy, a university-trained artist, painted with a brush that “moved on its own.” In order to better channel Lacamo’s energies, Peavy also constructed and wore masks when she painted, occasionally signing her works with Lacamo’s name alongside her own.

Peavy’s entire life was dedicated to promoting her worldview and various philosophies through drawing, painting, sculpture, text, and film. Her works on paper depict the artist’s individualized visual cosmos using shapes that resemble energy beams, solar systems, and procreative organic shapes signifying genitalia, ova, fallopian tubes, sperm, and fetuses. Peavy’s life and work were constantly evolving to reflect her belief in mankind’s evolution to an androgynous one-sex through contact with aliens.

Laura Whitcomb is a surrealist scholar and the director of Label Curatorial, which focuses on lesser-known artists and movements of the West Coast. She has worked at the Gala – Salvador Dalí Foundation at the Dalí Theatre Museum in Figueres, Spain, while also contributing essays for exhibitions at the Dalí Museum in Florida.

She is also a focused scholar of artists who engage hermetic traditions in their art practice. “Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler” in 2023 (D.A.P.) is edited by the adjunct LACMA curator Dr. Ilene Susan Fort and focuses on the channeler artist Paulina Peavy, whom Whitcomb curated at Beyond Baroque in 2021 and for the Andrew Edlin gallery in 2023.

Label Curatorial focuses on sound art and light artists. Studying the inceptive roots of what became Los Angeles’s most notable home-grown movement, she presented a Light and Space installation of Peter Alexander, Laddie John Dill, and Larry Bell at the official re-opening of the Brand Library and Art Center in 2014. In 2022, she curated “Luminaries of Light and Space” at LAX Airport, produced by Dublab, which included these artists along with Robert Irwin, De Wain Valentine, Fred Eversley, Helen Pashgian, Hap Tivey, and Gisela Colon. Whitcomb has two books forthcoming through Label Curatorial, highlighting artist and poet-run galleries from 1949-1965 and artists of the Beat era who continued surrealist lineages while exploring the occult.