Interviews by Brainard Carey

Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, and the 2014 - 2015 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen is currently Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.

The book mentioned is Edges & Fray by Danielle Vogel, published by Wesleyan University Press. LOOM • ROOM • HARP has it's own web site here: https://loom-room-harp.space/

one thing five times from Paula Matthusen on Vimeo.

between systems and grounds, with Olivia Valentine. Photo by Olivia Valentine. More info at https://betweensystemsandgrounds.com/

Photo by Anastasia Blackman

Sébastien Léon is a French Los Angeles-based creative director, designer, and multi-media artist who has shown internationally with cultural institutions (Palais de Tokyo, the Park Avenue Armory, the New Museum, the Palazzo della Triennale, UCCA), and developed ambitious artistic projects with brands (Audemars Piguet, Krug, Samsung, Audi).

Sébastien Léon’s work brings to life ethereal physical environments and sculptures that are at once tangible, familiar, and yet unmistakably abstract. His designs, typically relying on tubular metallic structures, are strongly influenced by his immediate environment. His decade in New York translates into collections inspired by the world of construction sites, and his move to California morphs into designs drawn from insects, rock formations, and the ocean.

Léon is the founder of acclaimed experiential studio Formavision, and the recipient of the FGI Rising Star award for his design work for Atelier d’Amis, the furniture company he co-founded in 2015. / www.atelierdamis.com / www.formavision.info / www.sebleon.com

Hydrochrom Sulu

Golden Horns

Clement Page, was born in Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom, and moved to London in 1990 where his formative experience as an artist took shape.

In early 90’s London as well as making his own work, Clement founded a studio complex in an abandoned hat factory in Bethnal Green, curated artist led exhibitions, wrote and published art criticism and gave artist lectures at Tate gallery, Sotheby’s, Goldsmiths and Ruskin school of art.

In 1996 Clement moved to New York City where he witnessed the emergence of the Chelsea gallery district and had a studio on the bowery.

In 2006 he moved to Berlin and now lives between Berlin and Bristol in the UK. Clement works with painting, film, and installation.

Currently Clement is working on a monograph of his work with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Sacha Carddock, to be published in 2023. His recent ‘mirror paintings’ will be exhibited at HSBC gallery London and

Santa Lucia galerie, Berlin in the coming year.

His films from the Goetz Media Art collection, Munich have been shown at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Germany, and Haus der Kunst, Munich Germany. and The Freud Museum, London. 

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have been creating multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queerness together for 20 years. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995, and morphed into a feminist performance artist and sex educator. Beth was a sculptor and installation artist and became a University art professor.

She’s taught at University of California Santa Cruz for 27 years. These days the duo make environmental films through an ecosexual gaze, they produce symposiums, do theater and performance artivism. Their Ecosex Manifesto launched the Ecosex Movement.

They are making a new film about fire for which they got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. A new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press) chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures.

Claudio Zulian is a visual and sound artist, film director, writer and musician. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics, Science and Technology of the Arts from the University of Paris-Saint Denis (France). He is a resident in Barcelona (Spain).

Many of Claudio Zulian's works are articulated around the notions of body and territory, often ironically dialectised. An example of this is one of his latest works Vallès: making pasts, making futures, a series of video installations whose exhibition was on view at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona  in 2019, curated by Valentín Roma. Another example of the study of these concepts was the exhibition Double Self-Portrait (2019), at the Espai Souvenir gallery in Barcelona. Previously, these themes had given rise to other works such as those included in the exhibition Enthusiasm (2012) at the Bòlit Centre d'Art in Girona and in ACVic or Political Poetics (2008) at CaixaForum in Barcelona.

Complementing these two notions, another of the central issues in his works is history. Stories of the Future was the title chosen by the Jeu de Paume in Paris for the retrospective held in October 2013, which included pieces such as Power no Power (2013), L'Avenir (2004) and Panamamundi (2006).

In 2010 he received the City of Barcelona Award and the National Film Culture Award for his video installation, film and book A través del Carmel (The shifting city) - an intimate portrait of the eponymous Barcelona neighbourhood, shot in a single 90-minute sequence shot.

In 2020 he released We were not born refugees, a documentary about the lives of eight refugees in Barcelona. In the same year he shot The Magic Mountain, a documentary and video installation about the effects of globalisation in a village in northern Italy.

He has carried out an intense work as a composer and performer of contemporary music.

He regularly publishes articles in newspapers and magazines, many of which can be read on his blog.

La montagna incantata TRAILER from ACTEON on Vimeo.

 

 

In collaboration with the fluid processes of photography, Holly Murkerson’s work makes visible an emergent space where body and environment bleed into one another. Based in Chicago, Illinois, Murkerson is a Co-Director of the artist-run gallery, Adds Donna.

Past exhibitions include 65Grand, Chicago; Comfort Station, Chicago; Rainbo Club, Chicago; Heaven Gallery, Chicago, Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Rockford University Art Gallery, Rockford, IL; Roots & Culture, Chicago; Julius Caesar, Chicago; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, The Ragdale Foundation, and Oxbow School of Art, as well as the recipient of grants from The Illinois Art Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

The book mentioned in the interview is Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. 

One and one make three, 2020 Unique silver gelatin print, 20 x 16 inches

Two halves make a hole, 2020Unique silver gelatin prints mounted on archival rag board, diptych, 20 x 36 inches

Ryan Takaba is a material artist whose sculptures, tableaux, and installations are centered around a study of scientific reason and the power of belief, incorporating thematic materials -flowers, ash, wax, and water.

He exhibits his work throughout the United States and has participated in residencies at the European Ceramic Work Center -Netherlands, The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen -China, and was awarded a residency through Blue Star Contemporary to live and work at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin -Germany.

He earned an MFA in Ceramics from Kent State University and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Hawaii. Ryan currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

The books mentioned in the interview are Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik and The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. The Atlantic article mentioned can be read here.

A Relationship with Flight 2020-2021 Glassine Paper, Ivory Roses, Basswood, Incense Ash, Helium, Latex, Pillar Wax, Wick, Steel   235” * 341” * 120”

A Relationship with Flight 2020-2021 Glassine Paper, Ivory Roses, Basswood, Incense Ash, Helium, Latex, Pillar Wax, Wick, Steel   235” * 341” * 120”

kara lynch is a time-based artist living in the bronx, ny – born in the momentous year of 1968. kara completed the MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and has been a research fellow at the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas Austin and the Academy of African Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany. She is an emerit@Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College. In 2020 kara was awarded a Tulsa Artist Fellowship and joined Gallery of the Streets as a principled artist collaborator.

Her art practice is re-memory, vision, and movement. It manifests as poetics, process, and conjures autonomy for Black and Indigenous people across Diaspora. Through low-fi, collective practice, and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. This artist’s practice is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered – Black, Queer and Feminist.

Major projects include: ‘BlackRussians’ – a feature documentary video, ‘The Outing’ – a video travelogue, ‘MouhawalaOula’ – a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video & saxophone; ‘We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions’– an edited volume of Black Speculation; and the current project, ‘INVISIBLE’ – an episodic, speculative, multi-site video/audio installation that excavates the terror and resilient beauty of the Black-Indigenous experience.

Current explorations include: RuleReverse! a series of video interventions learning from Sylvia Wynter's Maskarade; "Come Prepared or Not At All" a series of drawings concerned with Black Towns and Futures. "Stories from the Core" a collaboration with Sarah and Maryam Ahmed; and Blues U - a bi-monthly radio show on radiocoyote.org/FM 90.1 Tulsa.

Spy-boi_prelude_RuleReverse! - still from performance September 2020/Greenwood Ave Tulsa, Indian Territory

SAVED [episode 03 of Invisible] postcard 2008/2013

Lola Clavo (Barcelona 1983) is an independent director-producer that often navigates the boundaries between documentary and fiction. A graduate in Film Directing by ESCAC (2007), she lived and worked in London for over 10 years, where she also graduated MFA in Film Making by Goldsmiths University of London (2012) on a full scholarship by Obra Social “La Caixa” Foundation. Her work has a strong social component, questioning gender roles, the representation of the body, femininity and sexuality. Her filmmaking philosophy is close to that of DIY, although always loyal to a theory and structure base learned during her years at film school. She’s been awarded several prizes, mostly related to the representations of sexualities, and screened work internationally. Clavo co-founded in 2012 the art collective Exotica Loom, along with multidisciplinary artist Mariana Echeverri, where they develop curatorial and experimental film projects. 

In 2006 she finished her fist documentary “La Plaza” (2016), an autobiographic reflection on subjects such as family, memory and the physical space around us. It premiered at Alcances Documentary Film Festival of Cadiz, wining the UPTOFEST prize for best medium-length film. Her following work, “Pennie” (2018), a portrait documentary reflecting on the concepts of feminity, body and sex work, was selected as closing film for the November Film Festival (London) and as part of Festival Rizoma’s parallel section Voyeur (Madrid), as well as being screened at an art gallery context. Clavo has also attended art residencies and been part of numerous talks and panel discussions in spaces such as Nottingham Contemporary and EACC (Space for Contemporary Art Castelló). She’s also passionate about  teaching and leads courses and workshops on filmmaking with an LGBTQ+ focus, as well as the portraying of intimacy in the audio-visual medium, specifically scenes with simulated sex and/or nudity.

The book mentioned in the interview is LA VIDA COTIDIANA DEL DIBUJANTE UNDERGROUND,  by Nazario.

A still from current project in development "WOMEN a butch ode"

A still image from the film "Pennie"

MUJERES una oda butch - teaser corto from lolaclavo on Vimeo.

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is a poet and installation artist in St. Louis. She is the author of the poetry collections Well Waiting Room (Fordham University Press, fall 2021) and Cleavemark (BOAAT Press, 2016) and the children's book The Cloud Lasso (Penny Candy Books, 2019). Her poems and art have appeared in Bomb, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, AGNI, Washington Square, At Length, The Offing, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Colorado Review, and on PoetryNow and the Poetry Foundation website, among others. She frequently collaborates with other artists, most recently with Cheryl Wassenaar on the installation The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs at the Des Lee Gallery. Her work can be viewed at stephanieschlaifer.com.

“The Archive of the Interior,” from The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs. A collaborative, multimedia installation with Cheryl Wassenaar.

Installation view, The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs. A collaborative, multimedia installation with Cheryl Wassenaar.

Installation view, The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs. A collaborative, multimedia installation with Cheryl Wassenaar.