Interviews by Brainard Carey

My practice varies from project-to-project, and is sometimes collaboration-based and at other times the result of my personal art making practices in diverse media, including site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, works on paper, films and audio pieces. My work has been exhibited at galleries in New York and elsewhere, including David Zwirner Gallery, Postmasters, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Xavier Hufkens (Brussels), Studio 10, and Pierogi 2000. In 1999 and 2000, a grant from Phillip Morris Foundation in conjunction with the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin allowed me to live and create work in Berlin. I had a major exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, as part of its Raw/ Cooked series. It featured multi-media installations in several parts of the museum, and a film program. In addition, I have done many projects abroad, including shows/installations/projects in Germany, Scandinavia and Ramallah.

1990 till 2000, I hosted and co-directed the Four Walls art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a project space whose function was something between a clubhouse and laboratory. It was a place where exhibitions, panel discussions, performances and projects took place, creating a nexus of cultural exchange for artists. In 1989, I received a National Endowment for the Arts grant which became seed money for the Four Walls project. My intent was to create a condition for the exchange of ideas.

From1993 to 2011, I directed, curated and organized The Slide and Film Club. I invited artists—and non-artists— to show Super8 films , 35mm slideshows and videos. A house band played improvised music to programs that lacked soundtracks, should someone request it. The project brought together hundreds of visual artists, writers and musicians such as Brian Dewan, Christian Marclay, Joy Garnett, Jim Torok and Carla Pearlman among others. It fostered the work of many artists, as well as my own Super 8 film work.

My studio practice over the past five years has primarily been object based. I have often relied on processes based on coincidence, or cues that I receive from my life in order to generate works which perform a useful function, or at least an approximation of one. For example, “Weathervane” at Pierogi Gallery in 1997, fulfilled its metrological role, as well as a quasi-metaphorical one: it took the form of an abstracted Pinocchio head. “Moo-Moo” (2010), was a giant, sculptural cow head on the roof of the Brooklyn restaurant, Diner. It was a portrait of one of the locally-sourced animals being served. “Billboard” in Hudson, New York played with the nature of what billboards are, using them to present subtly disorienting landscape images in unlikely places.

Since March of 2020, the world, and certainly my world, has been circumscribed by COVID, making it more difficult to present art in the usual ways. One piece I did in early 2021 was a guerrilla installation in a local park. In the tangle of branches of bushes and trees near the entrance of Cooper Park, one might find two blue rope-like sculptural forms weaving around the forms of the trees. Those pieces are called “Jay” and “Pea” and, in addition to bringing visual play to the local park, they commemorate my friend, the artist Joyce Pensato, who passed away the year before. It was the park she used to frequent with her dog.

Another recent project had a commemorative aspect, this year’s “Word of Bird is Cured” shown at Studio 10, Bushwick. My friend, the artist and writer Matt Friedman had passed away after a long illness. My piece covered the windows of the gallery with blue paper, with thousands of silhouettes of birds cut into the paper by hand. The gallery faced west, and as days grew long, projections of the birds flooded the room. In the room I created a series of cellophane bags, based on the forms of boulders.

The bags were inflated by fans from below,

Austin Thomas is an artist, curator, and community builder and is currently the exhibitions manager at FIT. A graduate of NYU, she has received numerous residencies and fellowships, including Wave Hill, Guttenberg Arts, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Smack Mellon. From 2007 to 2014, she directed the influential Pocket Utopia gallery. In 2016, New York City unveiled her permanent public sculpture for a new park in Brooklyn. She has also done public commissions for the Public Art Fund and Grinnell College. Thomas's work is in the book Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists and its sequel, The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, edited by Sharon Louden. In addition, Thomas's work has been shown nationally and internationally and written about in the New York Times, New Yorker, Art in American, The Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Review, and Hyperallergic. She is a seminar instructor at the New School, where she teaches the "Artist as Entrepreneur. " During the COVID shutdown, Thomas became a New York City history buff, walking her city and discovering it anew. She is a nature lover and enjoys nature writing, most recently reading Visualizing Nature, Essays on Truth, Spirit, and Philosophy edited by Stuart Kestenbaum.

Austin Thomas "COVID-19 Sequence," 24x42 in., ink on paper Crane's Blue Stationery

Austin Thomas "COVID Sketchbook," 5x7 in., 2020 Pen, pencil, and collage

Marci Vogel is a California-born poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of Death and Other Holidays (Melville House Press, 2018), winner of the inaugural Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize for the Novella and translated into French  as La Mort et autres jours de fête (Éditions do, 2020). Her debut poetry collection, At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, was awarded the inaugural Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize and selected for musical score by Brazilian composer, Renato Goulart.

The recipient of a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, Vogel's poetry, prose, translations, and cross-genre inventions have appeared in such publications as ZYZZYVA, Seneca Review, Waxwing, and Jacket2, and include the translation-focused commentary series A Poetics of the Étrangère. Vogel's writing has been recognized with grants and residencies by the Fondation Ténot, the Napa Valley Writer's Conference, the Community of Writers, and North Street Collective. She has been invited for readings and talks at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, the University of Strasbourg, Kelly Writers House, the University of Pennsylvania, the School of Beaux-Arts in Tours, France, and the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

A first-generation scholar, Vogel holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California, where she currently serves in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and the University of the Future.

Dr. Adam Zaretsky of NADLinc is a nomadic Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue culture (undead/semi-alive), transgenic design issues (traits/desires), interactive ethology (person/machine/non-human) and physiology (performance/stress). A former researcher at the MIT department of biology, Adam runs labs on DIY-IGM (Do-It-Yourself Inherited Genetic Modification of the Human Genome). His art practice focuses on an array of legal, ethical, social and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods with a focus on transgenic humans, methods of transgenesis and germline aesthetics. http://artsci.ucla.edu/node/1128

What he has been reading: Genbank Online Bioinformatics Database

meet the genome of the Dolphin Lipotes vexillifer UBE3D for fun reading:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/?term=Lipotes+vexillifer+UBE3D

Czech out the HECT_2; HECT-like Ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme (E2) binding FASTA and Sequence Viewer (Graphics) too!

For further research, the links Mentioned:

https://www.hackteria.org/workshops/thgap/

https://www.makery.info/en/author/adam-zaretsky/

https://www.makery.info/en/2021/09/01/english-human-germline-gene-editing-is-bioart-an-open-letter-to-lulu-and-nana/

Warplanes for Vultures – the failure of Art or Science to stop endless collateral damage, interspecies enrichment, sympathetic magick, eating the war machine, eaten by vultures during “Animal and Other Non-Human Enrichment in Parks and Preserves (Seeking Provisioning Advice)”, Bambi Seminar, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, 2019.

Hybrid DNA Isolation, Vivoarts: Biology and Art Studio Master Class, University of Leiden, 2007

Photo credit: Margarita Corporan

Gina Apostol's fourth novel, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers' Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 and selected as an Editor's Choice of the NYT. Her third book, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award.

Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She was a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, and Emily Harvey Foundation, among others. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

More than 500 of Bertha Rogers’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies; and in several chapbooks and full-length collections, among them Wild, Again (Salmon, 2019); Heart Turned Back (Salmon, 2011); and Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, 1991).

She is completing What Want Brings: New and Selected Poems (also to be published by Salmon in 2022). Her translation of Beowulf was published by Birch Brook PRESS in 2000, and her translation and illuminations of the riddle-poems in the thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book were published as Uncommon Creatures (Six Swans Artist Editions) in 2019. She co-founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center of the Catskills in 1992; although retired, as a master teaching artist, she still leads literary workshops and edits poetry collections for the Press and other organizations. She lives on a mountain in New York’s western Catskills.

Charles H. Traub has been a photographer/educator for over 50 years. His work is represented in major museums and collections all around the world. In 1988, he founded the MFA program of Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and still serves as its Chair. Formally, he was a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia Collage, Chicago. Later he directed New York's prestigious Light Gallery, and for over 25 years was president of the Aaron Siskind Foundation.

Traub has received numerous awards including the prestigious ICP Infinity Award for his work on here is new york: A Democracy of Photography. He has published 17 books, including 9 monographs of his own. Recent publications include Dolce Via (2014) Lunchtime (2015), the iBook No Perfect Heroes-Photographing U.S. Grant (2016), Taradiddle (2016), and Tickety-Boo (2021).

This diptych were shot in 2020. They are published in the book, Tickety-Boo.

This diptych were shot in 2020. They are published in the book, Tickety-Boo.

Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel is a Chilean curator residing in Santiago, Chile. She has produced and curated different cultural initiatives in museums and cultural centers in South America, Asia and Europe. She worked as Director of Art and Education for the Mar Adentro Foundation. She is currently the director of Centro Cultural La Moneda, the main space for the arts in Chile. Under her direction, relevant exhibitions have been exhibited, such as Obra Viva by Joaquín Torres García and J. M. W. Turner. Watercolors Tate Collection. And recently, in 2020, Soplo by Ernesto Neto, among others.

Her investigative and curatorial work is oriented towards the search for meaning and the activation of critical thinking, through artistic and cultural instances related to the context.

In 2021, under an intercultural methodology that involved joint work with representatives of the Selk'Nam, Kawésqar and Yagán First Nations communities, she directed the curatorship of El Ancho Mundo. Aproximaciones a Magallanes.

She developed the production in Chile for the Tomie Ohtake Institute, Brazil, for the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession. Between October 2014 and January 2015 she curated the Christian Boltanski project in Chile at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, and the Animitas installation in the Atacama desert, which was later exhibited in the All the World's Futures exhibition at the Venice Biennale whose General curator was Okwui Enwezor.

Together with Zara Stanhope, she co-curated the exhibition Space to Dream: Recent art from South America, held in 2016 at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki Museum, New Zealand, highlighted by the local press as the best exhibition of the last thirty years.

Curator of the exhibition Our Site, South American Artists for the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and for the Visual Arts Museum, Santiago, Chile.

Curator and co-producer of the exhibition Umbraculum, by Belgian artist Jan Fabre, at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, Colombia, and the Tambo Quirquincho Museum, La Paz, Bolivia.

During 2005 and 2008 she was Coordinator of the Production and Programming Unit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Chile.

She also participated as co-curator and general producer of the exhibition Desde el Otro Sitio/Lugar at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2005); co-curator and producer of Correspondencias, at the Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, Germany (2002). And from 2010 to date, she is a member of the advisory board of Key Performance, in Sweden.

The book mentioned in the interview is Violeta Parra en el Wallmapu. Su encuentro con el mundo mapuche by Paula Miranda, Elisa Loncon, Allison Ramay.

Ketta Ioannidou with Black Spring painting

Ketta Ioannidou (b. Nicosia, Cyprus) lives and works in New York, NY. Ioannidou holds an MFA from School of Visual Arts and a BA (Honours) from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Ioannidou represented Cyprus in the Cairo and Alexandria Biennales in Egypt and the 18th Asian Biennale in Bangladesh. She has had solo exhibitions at The Yard, Brooklyn, NY; South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, NY; Diatopos Centre of Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Cyprus; chashama 266, New York, NY.

Ioannidou has participated in group exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg, New York, NY; Superchief Gallery NFT, New York, NY; SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; KUSTERA PROJECTS RED HOOK, Brooklyn, NY, Islip Art Museum, NY, and Local Project Art Space, Long Island City, NY. Residencies include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, AIM at the Bronx Museum, I-Park, and Aljira Emerge. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, the Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic.

"Black Rainbows", 2020, Oil on canvas, 43 x 34 inches

"Black Spring", 2021, Oil on canvas, 72 x 55 inches

"TARDIS_Time and Relative Dimensions In Space", 2020, Oil on canvas, 43 x 34 inches

Greg Slick (born 1961 in Jersey City, NJ) is a visual artist and independent curator based in Beacon, NY. Time, history, archaeology, and anthropology play major thematic roles in his work. Most recently his work was featured in the group exhibitions One Thing Leads to Another at The Lockwood Gallery, Kingston, NY, and Collective Expeditions, at both BSB Gallery, Trenton, NJ and SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, NY. Other group exhibitions include Take Back the Walls at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY; Painting in the 21st Century, at Site:Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY; and Time Travelers at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Old Bones and Broken Stones at No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works, Beacon, NY and Opened Ground at the Seligmann Center, Sugar Loaf, NY. Slick is the founder and co-curator of the artists’ collective The International Society of Antiquaries.

Slick’s paintings investigate ideas of monumentality through the geometries of prehistoric archaeological sites. Using color, texture, patterns of entoptic phenomena, and occasional references to archaeological drawing, his work examines how megalithic shapes can occupy space in different and compelling ways within an abstract language. Hardedge forms reinterpret tumbles of stones at Neolithic sites as a composition of texture/color upon a vibrant ground. Color schemes allude to changing light in rural areas where these stones are found. The intended challenge to the viewer is to read deeply and consider the meaning and politics of monument building along the human journey. Specific Neolithic and Iron Age sites that are referenced in his paintings are located in Ireland, the UK, and Spain. Visits to Los Toros de Guisando and the dolmens of Antequera in Spain, for example, galvanized an interest in the prehistory of Spain. As his practice developed around this theme, he became more invested in how traditional cultural forms, such as abstract patterns and building techniques, have persisted across millennia. The long shadow of prehistoric cultures can still be seen today in Spain in such things as rural structures (eg, shepherds’ huts) and folk designs on clay and ceramic wares.

Books mentioned in this interview include Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and The Neolithic of Britain and Ireland by Vicki Cummings.

Cave Consciousness, 2021, acrylic on wood panel, 36 x 30 in.

Old Materiality, 2021, acrylic on wood panel, 24 x 20 in.