Interviews by Brainard Carey

Examining the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity, culture, and representation, Nicholas Galanin works from his experience as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist. Embedding incisive observation and reflection into his oftentimes provocative work, he aims to redress the widespread misappropriation of Indigenous visual culture, the impact of colonialism, as well as collective amnesia. Galanin reclaims narrative and creative agency, while demonstrating contemporary Indigenous art as a continually evolving practice. As he describes: “My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future. I use my work to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, and connection and disconnection to the land.” Galanin unites both traditional and contemporary practices, creating a synthesis of elements in order to navigate “the politics of cultural representation.” Speaking through multiple visual, sonic, and tactile languages, his concepts determine his processes, which include sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance, and textile-based work. This contemporary practice builds upon an Indigenous artistic continuum while celebrating the culture and its people; Galanin contributes urgent criticality and vision through resonant and layered works.

The online viewing room at Peter Blum can be seen here.

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979, Sitka, Alaska) earned a BFA at London Guildhall University (2003), an MFA at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand (2007), and apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers. He currently lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska. Galanin participated in Desert X, Palm Springs (2021); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Venice Biennale (2017); Whitney Biennial (2019); and Honolulu Biennial (2019). Galanin’s work is in permanent collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Art Bridges, Bentonville, AR; Detroit Institute of Arts; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Denver Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Princeton University among others. He received an award from American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020) and received a Soros Arts Fellowship (2020).

Loom, 2022 prefab children's school desks and chairs with graphite and pencil carving, 100 x 83 x 54 inches (254 x 210.8 x 137.2 cm)

World Clock, 2022 monotype on paper and accumulating stacks of The New York Times installation: dimensions variable monotype: 30 x 22 1/2 inches (76.2 x 57.1 cm) The New York Times: 11 1/4 x 12 inches, each

Chris Regner is an artist born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He works serially, using autobiography as a jumping-off point for satire, humiliation, and explorations of the grotesque. His work tackles a variety of topics, including religious and cultish indoctrination, the effect of technology on societal discourse, how to navigate adulthood as a male with no strong role models, and stereotypical notions of masculinity that find their way into every subject he explores. Using his personal experiences as a foundation, his paintings have questioned archetypes found within these themes, all the while challenging his own values and beliefs. He positions himself as an anti-proselytizer, complicating the easy answer and presenting morally questionable individuals with the intent of causing contradictory interpretations by the viewer. Navigating this discomfort is vital when searching for a greater truth.

Chris is a recent graduate of RISD’s MFA Painting program. He is represented by Kravets Wehby Gallery. He has shown his work internationally. His work is a part of multiple private collections internationally. His work is in the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art.

He is represented by Kravets Wehby Gallery.

Give a Boy a Worm..., 2021, 45"x35", Acrylic on canvas over panel

That's My Boy No. 5 (Father Devouring Son Devouring Son), 2020, 45"x35", Acrylic on canvas over panel

Rainer Gross in his studio - photo by David Benthal

Rainer Gross was born in Cologne, Germany in 1951. In 1973 he left Cologne to come to New York City, where he continued his art career at a time when many proclaimed the “end of painting.” Gross’ reaction to this proclamation was to draw on his connection to the painterly heritage of traditional European Art and its usage of iconography, and to establish a vocabulary capable of taking these historical traditions into the present. The dense and weathered surfaces of his paintings, realized through layers of pressed pigments, do just this.

He has exhibited his works in numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally at venues such as the Ludwig Museum (Koblenz, Germany), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland), Krannert Art museum (Champaign, Illinois) and many others.

Gross’ paintings are in numerous public collections, including the AT&T Corporate Art Collection, the Cohen Family Collection, the UBS Union B­­ank of Switzerland,  Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Lowe Art Museum amongst others. His works have been reviewed by The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art in America, The Boston Globe, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, and many more.

The book he is reading now is The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia,

Double Twins X -Münstereifel, 2021, 54x132” in four parts, oil and pigments on canvas

Double Take - NoFo X 2022, 24x16", 61x41cm, framed 26x18", 66x46cm Archival pigment high-quality giclée print on Photo Rag Ultra Smooth Matte FineArt Paper from Hahnemuhle, mounted on wood panel.

Courtesy Studio David Claerbout

This interview discusses the work of Claerbout in the context of an exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery in New York City..

Throughout his career, the Belgian artist David Claerbout has investigated the conceptual impact of the passage of time through his use of video and digital photography. As scholar David Green has explained, “Claerbout’s work subtly proposes a relationship of similitude between film and the objective world that lies outside and beyond the narrative space of cinema. In doing so he poses a set of questions about how we experience film and about the nature of the medium itself.”

Specifically, Claerbout manipulates both moving and still imagery to suggest an otherworldly level of existence, something that might refer to a specific place or event, but the timeline of which is not clear, oscillating between both past and present. The element of sound is critical in many of the works, often used as either a narrative device or a “guide” for the viewer to navigate the architectural space in the film. Claerbout’s oeuvre is characterized by a meticulous attention to production details, painstakingly created often over a period of years. The resultant works are immersive environments in which the viewer is invited to engage both philosophically and aesthetically.

Claerbout studied at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp from 1992 to 1995 and participated in the DAAD: Berlin Artists-in-Residence program from 2002 to 2003. Claerbout’s work is included in major public collections worldwide, including: Centre Georges Pompidou Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, and many others.

David Claerbout lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium and Berlin, Germany.

Installation view of David Claerbout: Dark Optics at Sean Kelly, New York, April 27 - June 4, 2022, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

Installation view of David Claerbout: Dark Optics at Sean Kelly, New York, April 27 - June 4, 2022, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

Installation view of David Claerbout: Dark Optics at Sean Kelly, New York, April 27 - June 4, 2022, Photography: Jason Wyche, New York, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

Scott Lyall

Scott Lyall (b. 1964, Toronto) lives and works in Toronto and New York. Scott Lyall combines drawing, painting, sculpture, and found objects into what he describes as a ‘scenography without actors,’ or ‘plastic supports for an almost clientless sense of design.’ His production revolves around issues related to sculptural display, the relationships between graphic processes, and the design legacies of conceptualism.

While Lyall’s earlier work involved installations created from construction and everyday materials such as particleboard, styrofoam, and other ephemeral fragments, his recent practice is predominantly comprised of graphic assemblages and printouts produced without direct mediation of an image. Referencing Bruno Latour, the artist describes his Nudes and EVEs series as “design all the way down,” a statement that resonates with Mark Rothko’s use of pigmented gessoes to achieve what he called “color all the way down.”

Originating from the basic and most abstract unit of the digital realm—the single color pixel—the pale hues of Lyall’s color wave paintings and stickers are formed through a method of mathematical interpolation that generates a unique and potentially infinite bitstream. The resulting information is sent directly to the print heads, which apply sheer layers of ink such that the gradient color-deposits are mixed directly on the substrate. The immediate relationship between the numerical formula and the printer is akin to a “fauve" effect of releasing color from the received image. Embodying a movement from pure quantity—a digital field of dispersions and exchange—to form, these works are inherently split objects that exist first immaterially, and materially in the last instance. They address the informational fetish of recent art and the dissolution of visible signs.

The Nudes stand slightly detached from the wall, affixed to hand-painted monochrome MDF panels of corresponding dimensions, which are in turn attached to the wall directly – digital dust on canvas, one might say, over compressed and solidified wood powder. The pieces combine ink and its erasure in canvases subjected to multiple passes through a UV-based printer. The result is a subtle residual ‘tan’ that suggests an index of rays ‘beyond color’ that affect the tonal assemblage. Lyall describes the EVE vinyl adhesive sheets as ‘thin reliefs,’ and relates the printed posters to a generalized artistic space between painted, sculptural, and architectural forms. A glued sticker on one side of the panel and a spray of cartridge inks on the other establish a relationship between plastic and graphic determinations of the print. The interaction of the surfaces of the ultrathin paste-up and the façade of a smooth wall creates an implication of depth. Because of the use of non-archival inks in the instance of the adhesive sheets, each printout will eventually fade to white, thus merging with and disappearing into the wall that houses it. In this sense, these works exist beyond the traditional confines of the wall and architecture more generally.  A further constitutive feature of the file is its capacity to circulate electronically freely around the globe and beyond before the moment of incarnation. The owners of unique bitstreams are then entrusted to printout new iterations of the color fields at will. This is painting engaging the digital realm and pushing it to the limit of its material and conceptual possibilities by reducing it to a sequence of three discrete and subjective gestures: 1. The random selection of an entry point among the 284 million color options. 2. The algorithmic unleashing of the infinite expansion of the file. 3. The final decision to cut the color progression in a particular place, that is finding the edges of the gradient before outputting its content onto a chosen substrate. As such, the painting object is suspended until the last impulse of incarnation....

Miami-based collage artist, Jon Davis, presents his most recent body of work as an homage to the city he calls home. Throughout “Brokedown Palace” images capturing ‘moments’ of Miami are fractured, stratified, and presented through a renewed understanding of not only the space they represent, but as they currently exist within each seamless rendering. After undergoing a year-long distillation period, this most recent body of work can be expressed as the culmination of Davis’s practice over the past 30 years.

In previous iterations of his work, Davis has used found photographs to curate narratives that express the nuanced, often untranslatable, realities that exist within the human experience. In this tangential vein of new work, “Brokedown Palace” brings this concept closer to come featuring photographs taken by the artist throughout the tropical metropolis, placed in conversation with imagery pertinent to the larger story of Art History, and translated through Davis’s conceptually based process.

Davis’s work is comprised of synthesized realities, dissolving the gap between past and present. He merges each selected image to question a conventional understanding of reality while simultaneously highlighting their similarities. He flattens the chronological distance between each facet within each collage as they are flush, mounted on canvas or wood. Davis’s work shows that regardless of the technological changes that develop with the passing of time, the symbiotic relationship between art and life never ceases.

Through the duration of his artistic career, Davis’s self-taught practice creates his distinctly unique visual language, pulling inspiration from the philosophical, and ensuing formal, evolution of the arts in the late twentieth century. Davis’s work can be understood as a personal rendition of ready-mades, as he transforms present happenings provided by his surroundings through each synthesized reality contained within panes of glass. In this, Davis uses skills of everyday life to reflect a higher creative culture.

He is currently reading Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarrantino.

Photo Courtesy Perrotin and the artist.

Gabriel de la Mora, born in 1968 in Mexico City where he currently lives and works, is best known for constructing visual works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects. In an obsessive process of collecting and fragmenting materials - eggshells, shoe soles, speaker screens, feathers - the Mexican artist creates seemingly minimal and often monochrome-looking surfaces that belie great technical complexity, conceptual rigor, and embedded information.

De la Mora has exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York, and the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico. His work is part of collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Gabriel de la Mora 720 I - M.D, 2021 Mosaico de alas de mariposa Morpho didius sobre cartulina de museo / Morpho didius butterfly wings mosaic on museum cardboard. Framed Dimensions: 35 x 35 x 6 cm 13.78 x 13.78 x 2.36 inches. Image Dimensions: 30 x 30 x 2 cm 11.81 x 11.81 x .79 inches. Signed backwards and dated backwards firmada al reverso y fechada al reverso *The butterfly wings used in this new Lepidoptera series come from butterflies raised in butterfly farms in Peru, Indonesia and Madagascar, dying naturally when released, they are collected by local communities. Photo Courtesy Perrotin and the artist.

Gabriel de la Mora 1,240 - H. L., 2021, Mosaico de alas de mariposa Hebomoia leucippe sobre cartulina de museo / Hebomoia leucippe butterfly wings mosaic on museum cardboard. Framed Dimensions: 35 x 35 x 6 cm 13.78 x 13.78 x 2.36 inches. Image Dimensions: 30 x 30 x 2 cm 11.81 x 11.81 x .79 inches.  *The butterfly wings used in this new Lepidoptera series come from butterflies raised in butterfly farms in Peru, Indonesia and Madagascar, dying naturally when released, they are collected by local communities. Photos Courtesy Perrotin and the artist.

Luisa Rabbia (b. 1970, Turin, Italy) blends the distinctions made between the human and the natural, expressing solidarity with the cosmos through the organic, bodily landscapes of her expansive paintings. The scale of Rabbia's paintings suits the themes she explores, oftentimes depicting overlapping abstracted figures joining and breaking apart, seemingly overcoming their physicality. She alludes to interconnected natural processes forming a thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Continually in flux and transforming, her forms created in expressive hues also evoke spiritual transitions. Upon closer viewing and bringing this substantial work to a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with its rhythmically scraped paint, the stratification of pencil marks, and imprints of fingertips. Rabbia alludes to the minute traces that each person leaves over the course of a lifetime, yet simultaneously asserts an expansive and interconnected vision of a wider universe.

Luisa Rabbia lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is represented in NY by Peter Blum Gallery. She received her MFA from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, Italy. Solo museum exhibitions include: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy; Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy. Group exhibitions include: Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, NY; Manifesta 12, Palazzo Drago, Palermo, Italy; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy; Biennale del Disegno, Museo della Citta, Rimini, Italy; Lismore Castle, Waterford, Ireland; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, NY; Maison Particulière, Brussels, Belgium; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy; MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China.

Rabbia was a Visiting Professor in Drawing at Harvard University, Cambridge, in 2013/2014. She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2007.

Ecstasy, 2019 colored pencil, pastel, acrylic and oil on canvas 102 x 47 inches (260 x 119 cm) Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York Photo credit: Dario Lasagni

The Currency Project is a conceptual art piece that explores value creation and value transfer.

Created and implemented by Abdul Mazid and Julian Lombardi in March 2020, The Currency Project seeks to use social engagement as a platform to explore contemporary theories surrounding currency, value and markets. By using tradeable sports cards as the basis for the project, Mazid and Lombardi are able to engage an economy and marketplace that already exists while exploring spaces surrounding art and the creative process.

The social practice element of the piece elicits engagement from the public through multiple platforms, social media, and through transactions. Ultimately, the project seeks to understand concepts surrounding currency as a form of transactional storage of value.

Elaine A. King was born in Oak, Park, Illinois and grew up in the Chicago area.  She was a Professor, at Carnegie Mellon University teaching the History of Art/Theory/Museum Studies.  King received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1986 from the School of Speech (Theory and Culture) and History of Art. Dr. King holds a joint Masters Degree in Art History and Public Policy, from Northern Illinois University and her B.A. was awarded from Northern Illinois University in Art History and American History [Pre-Law]. In 2002 she received a Certificate of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts Appraisal New York University.  In May 2011 she was invited to become a member of the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

She is a freelance critic who frequently writes for Sculpture, ARTES, Grapheion and the Washington Post.

Dr. King served as the Executive Director and Curator of the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery [1985-1991, and was the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, [1993-1995] following the Robert Mapplethorpe debacle. Throughout her career as a curator she organized over forty-five art exhibitions, including a wide range of one-person exhibitions and catalogues for artists, Barry Le Va, Martin Puryear, Tishan Hsu, Gordan Matta-Clark, Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, Nancy Spero, Robert Wilson, David Humphrey, and Martha Rosler. In addition, she has curated a wide range of group exhibitions including Light Into Art: Photography to Virtual Reality, New Generations, New York, Chicago, The Figure As Fiction, Abstraction Today, Drawing in the Eighties, and Art In the Age of Information. In February 2007 she was the guest curator for the Maria Mater O’Neill mid-career survey exhibition for the Museo of Art Puerto Rico, San Juan that opened in February 2007 and compiled a catalogue titled Artist Interrupted, 1986-2006.  In the fall of 2009 she was a guest curator at the Mattress Factory, in Pittsburgh for the exhibition titled Likeness: Transformation of Portrayal After Warhol’s Legacy. King has been the guest curator several times for the Hungarian Graphic Arts Biennial in Gyór between 1993-2005. The International Studies Art Program American University’s selected her to be the distinguished Art Historian/Critic in-residence to teach in Corciano, Italy, in the fall 2006.  Additionally Elaine King and Kim Levin were asked to nominate artists for the Venice Biennale.

She has been awarded numerous grants from diverse agencies including: United States Office of Information –Curatorial Grant for the American Section of the Master of Graphic Arts Biennial, Györ Hungary [shipping] Pennsylvania Arts Council Grant, Art Criticism Fellowship, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Rockefeller Foundation, (research in Slovakia) The National Endowment for the Arts (In 1989,1988,1985, 1983) Museum s/catalogues, Hillman Foundation, Warhol Foundation, Richard K. Mellon Foundation Grant, French International Fund from Artists’ Action, for the Michel Gerard exhibit, American Association of Museums, Award of Merit for the Tishan Hsu catalogue Award of Distinction, American Association of Museums for the Mel Bochner catalogue. She was awarded an IREX grant to do research in Prague on changes in contemporary art after the fall of the wall. King was part of a panel discussion on Censorship and the Culture Wars at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and a reviewer for Bullfrog Films.

In September 2006, Allworth Press published the anthology titled Ethics and the Visual Arts that she and Gail Levin co-edited. Elaine King. In 2001 she was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum to research contemporary portraiture.  Also King was awarded a Short-term Research Fellow in 2003 from the Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery as well as a Short-term Fellowship at the Smithsonian Archives of Americ...