Interviews by Brainard Carey

Marta Obiols Fornell is a curator and an art gallery owner in Gozo, Malta. She runs the gallery together with Tomas Hed with a focus on modern, contemporary art.

She studied Philosophy in Spain and Germany and also Religious Sciences. Her strong motivation and determination in dealing with artists in Malta, especially in Gozo, has enabled her to launch a number of exhibitions, art talks, philosophy meetings, music sessions, etc. Having created interest and curiosity around art related activities, she plans to develop her gallery as a centre of culture, innovation; as a place to enjoy and share art and ideas.

She has established contacts with other galleries from Europe and continues to grow in her dealings with locals and foreigners artists. Marta’s art experiences have been quite an exciting adventure and more is to come! Marta received the Gozo’s Best Female Entrepreneur of the year 2019 Award. And she has recently published in Malta “Easeful Death”, a philosophical essay.

Tomas Hed, originally from Sweden, lives in Gozo (Malta), where he lets his imagination and creativity go wild. Here he has found his place to exploit his talents: composing music, writing and, of course, painting. He worked for many years as an Art Director in Stockholm, having his own studio in Gamla Stan, the old part of the city. As a seeking youth Tomas developed in an artistic atmosphere, living in a community with other artists. Tomas’ father was an artist too; therefore paint and canvases have always been around him.

Always polemical, provocative and with strong opinions, it’s impossible to be indifferent to his creations. The spirit of his art is inspired by an indomitable character, with a special obsession for challenging values, or “bubbles” as he calls them, of our daily life.

Edgar Oliver, photo by Pavel Antonov

Edgar Oliver is a writer and performer who has lived and worked in New York for many years.  He started out reading his poems and performing monologues at the Pyramid night club in the early 1980’s.

This is his third interview with Brainard Carey in this series.

From 1988 to 2001 he wrote and staged a series of autobiographical plays – premiering a new play almost every year in the Club at LaMama on east 4th Street.

Titles include The Seven Year Vacation, The Ghost of Brooklyn, Mosquito Succulence, Motel Blue 19, and The Drowning Pages.

In recent years he has written and performed a series of one man shows that have won much critical acclaim.

These shows include Helen and Edgar – directed by Catharine Burns of The Moth – and East 10th Street: self-portrait with empty house, In the Park, and Attorney Street – all three directed by Randy Sharp of the Axis Theatre Company.

The images below are book covers and spreads from the poetry books mentioned in the interview that are published and sold by Oilcan Press.

Bek Andersen received an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art in 2017 after working for several years as a fashion and entertainment photographer in New York City.

A queer spiritualist raised by devout Mormon parents in a suburb of Oklahoma City, Andersen’s work is concerned with the fictive and performative identities of power, gender, sex and the mythologies through which the present claims authenticity.

This background situates the work between a variety of technologies and attendant politics of display. Her photographs and installations present visions of truth as a provocation to look more closely at the narratives that shape our worldview.

The book mentioned in the interview was She Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Garden Pleasure, Yale Architecture Gallery, Jan 2020 Window Triptych: (Pods, Figs, Pods). Common Milkweed, Camille holding figs. Materials: Newsprint, face mounted with Vegetable Oil. This Piece is 100% Compostable. 10 1/4' h x 23 1/2' w.

Who Governs? Artspace New Haven, Oct 2020 Power Portraits: The official unofficial leadership of New Haven's social justice movement Materials: Fiber Inkjet prints, Wheatpaste 6' h x 8' w

Art Values & Philosophies

By Daniel Foster

Art is fundamentally about the pursuit of beauty and/or truth.   Beauty is not always truthful, and truth is not always beautiful.  Very few professions work with such important content and tools for change and the humanistic benefit of the individual, family, groups, organizations, communities, and society.

Everyone’s “Wow” is equal and authentic.   We are all visual creatures that become experts about what we love to look at a very early age – and then institutionalized child development and educational processes work to undermine our confidence in our own eyes and natural “response system”, further reinforced in adulthood by the art world elitist establishment and its intellectual and cultural arrogance. Eventually, too many adults don’t know or are too scared to express what they like or don’t like in art.

Trend towards collective vs. isolated impact models.  Competition in the capitalistic marketplace may be good; but, it’s ‘poison’ in the charity/nonprofit world.  Funders/philanthropists create grant competitions for funding between similar-missioned nonprofit organizations in the same definable community.  Ultimately, this produces highly siloed, fragmented, and disorganized community efforts that DO NOT address the systemic causal factors --- but, simply place a “band aid” on the year-after-year problem.  Sustainable impact models require collaborative, coordinated, and leveraged approaches utilizing many diverse leaders/organizations with adequate long-term resource support.  After a century of American philanthropy, the nonprofit sector needs a revolutionary change (like every other major industry/institution in America over 100 years old).  The nonprofit “operating system” has grown arcane, wasteful, and ineffective in addressing the needs of its citizens/communities.  Read “Collective Impact” by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Art is Content AND Context.  The realm of content has been explored extensively in the 20th century – particularly in the postmodern era...The new frontier in art is comprehensively exploring the ‘contextualization’ of this content into our daily public and private lives and hour-by-hour “consciousness”.  Many civic-public arts programs are a crude form of “tokenism” …A token nod or gesture to the local arts community.  The difference between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ arts community is generally about 2-3 dozen outdoor sculptures/artworks scattered around many square miles of land, walkways, and streets!  Most residents in a ‘good’ art city live without any ‘good’ art in their visual public/outdoor landscape, other than an occasional sculpture or mural observed for a few seconds while in transit. Most offices and workplaces are devoid of ‘good’ or ‘original’ art that reflect the values (and artists) of the local community; and, the same is true for most people’s homes. It’s befuddling that many people who spend $500,000 on a home; and $50,000 on a car; won’t even spend $500 on a good original artwork, instead opting to spend $50 on a generic framed art poster over the sofa.  FYI, the art in your home speaks as loudly about YOU to your family and friends as the car or the home, maybe even more so!

 

Art is the “artifact” of a creative journey/process designed/executed by the artist.   Most great artists are firmly committed to the “process”, recognizing that good ingredients and good processes produce good outputs and results…usually.  The “artifact” is like an artist’s snapshot of his/her journey at a certain moment in time and place.

Art is spiritual technology.   Many artists find their source of inspiration from deep within their soul – a powerful portal to connecting with their deepest spiritual, religious, and philosophical beliefs and sense of purpose.  Thus, artmaking can be a form of spiritual practice which can produce pow...

Jared Ledesma is Associate Curator at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. The Des Moines Art Center is a nationally renowned modern and contemporary art museum with an esteemed permanent collection, and an art school that offers studio classes for artists of all ages. Since arriving at the Art Center in 2017, Ledesma has organized more than a dozen exhibitions. This includes Queer Abstraction (2019-2020), the Art Center’s first exhibition in its 70-year history to focus on gender and sexuality. The exhibition earned a commendation from the 2019 Sotheby’s Prize jury for its groundbreaking scholarship and the 2020 SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalog of Contemporary Materials. Other exhibitions Ledesma has organized include Hedda Sterne: Imagination and Machine (2020), Jeffrey Gibson: I Was Here (2019), The Art Students League of New York (2018-2019), and I, too, am America (2017). Currently, Ledesma is working on Louis Fratino: Tenderness revealed, a major exhibition opening on November 13, 2021.

Before working at the Des Moines Art Center, Ledesma was curatorial assistant in the department of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Ledesma is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and holds both a BA and MA in art history from San Francisco State University.

The book mentioned in the interview was The Householders by Robert Duncan and Jess.

The images below are from an upcoming show by Olivia Valentine who has also been interviewed previously here.

Olivia Valentine, Mediate/Equivocate mockup for the exhibition “Iowa Artists 2021: Olivia Valentine,” presented at the Des Moines Art Center, March 12–May 16, 2021.

Not of longing, but of light, 2019, Plaster, rabbit skin glue, watercolor. Photo: Olivia Valentine © Olivia Valentine

Alison Ward is a multimedia artist based in Kingsbury, Texas.  Her work spans the gamut from vaudeville to multimedia installation sculptures, but in everything she does she creates pieces that involve a larger audience, getting them directly involved and participating in the work.  She is currently working on a collective project called Habitable Spaces.  Habitable Spaces is part ecovillage, part living sculpture.  It is a continually evolving project that invites a community of artists and farmers in to help visualize utopia.

Before arriving in Kingsbury, Alison lived and worked in New York city showing and performing at the Queens Museum, The Dumbo Arts Center, the Bronx Museum, the CCCB Museum in Spain, RAW Space Gallery in Australia, Castlefield Gallery in England, and the Ponce Museum in Puerto Rico. She has done residencies at Raw Space in Australia, The Artist in the Marketplace Program, the LMCC studio program, Swing Space, Flux Factory and the Islington Mill in Manchester.  She has received grants and awards from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Lewisham Arts council in London, the Idea fund in Houston, the GVEC Power up grant, Union Pacific, the San Antonio Area Foundation and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Image of artist at home during Zoom video conference

José Guadalupe Garza was born along the US/Mexico border. He is an artist, educator, and veteran working in new and traditional media. His studio practice utilizes cinema and popular culture as theoretical frameworks to explore the changing demographic and cultural landscape of the U.S. with significance to the Latinx experience. Garza borrows from films, music, literary works, and the science fiction genre to create reimagined narratives. His projects take on various forms such as ad hoc libraries, curated screenings and exhibitions, improvisations and reenactments, experimental lectures and presentations, workshops, drawing, photography, sculpture, and video.

Garza has exhibited nationally and internationally including the 2017 Biennale de Spazio Pubblico in Rome (2017), From the Archives, Video Art in America at Everson Museum (2019), Border Control at University of Michigan Stamps Gallery (2019), and the Counterpublic Triennial (2019). He earned a BFA in Drawing from the University of Florida and an MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. Currently, he serves as the Museum Educator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, is a founding member of Monaco, an artist run cooperative in St. Louis, MO, and serves on the boards of Bread and Roses Missouri, Latinx Arts Network, Paul Artspace, and the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University.

Some of the books mentioned in the interview -

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Lavin and artwork by Lia Halloran and The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson, also mentioned was "The Slow Cancelation of the Future", a title of a body of work and in reference to the first chapter of Mark Fisher's book, Ghosts of My Life and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi.

Shelter in Place (El Norte), 15 framed Polaroid photographs, 18x24 inches, 2020

WhiteNoise/BlindContour series (Skull, Books, Headphones, Fruit), archival ink on graph journal paper, 12x8.5", 2020

Carlos works with a variety of processes and materials, both living and nonliving, that result in sculptural and participatory artworks.These span across different levels of bodily sensation and awareness; from the microbiological to the performative and social bodies. His main line of line of work traces evolutionary processes that stem from digestion and cognition and result in the distribution of biological processes across multi-species entanglements and cybernetic metabolisms.

Carlos has developed collaborative projects at spaces such as Autoitalia, Seventeen Gallery and Diaspore Project Space, London, Cráter Invertido, Mexico, Hangar, Lisbon as well as institutions such as CA2M, and Matadero, Madrid, HIAP Helsinki, and has shown his individual practice at LUMA Arles, Z33, Istanbul Design Biennial or the Tallin Biennial amongst others.

The books mentioned in the interview were Sensitive Chaos by Theodor Schwenk, Nose Dive a field guide to the world’s smells by Harold McGee and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake.

Colloquy of Vessels-2018-2020 Hand Blown Glass, steel tubing, cotton thread, avocado stone.

SAUNA - 2017

Catherine Pierce (photo by Megan Bean / © Mississippi State University)

Catherine Pierce is the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days, published by Saturnalia Books in October 2020.

Her other books are The Tornado Is the World, The Girls of Peculiar, and Famous Last Words.

Pierce’s work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she is professor of English at Mississippi State University, where she co-directs the creative writing program.

Books mentioned in the interview - Danger Days, The Tornado is the World, The Girls of Peculiar and Famous Last Words.

Lenard Smith is a first generation Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Smith’s Advanced Photographic Studies MFA from Bard College grounds his work in traditional practices and methodologies — his interest in tableaux pictures are derived from historical guide books that offer solutions to life or death scenarios. Smith's experimentation with sculpture comes from an urge to collect and make meaning of the natural world we inhabit and what humankind has made of the world.

In 2020 Smith was included in virtual exhibitions with Los Angeles Municipal gallery and received grants from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and an Artist Relief Grant to continue his studio practice from home.

Smith has held artist residencies at Salmon Creek Farm (Mendocino CA), Unpublished Studio (Los Angeles CA), and Light Work Artist Residency Program (New York), published books with Pau Wau Publications, &Press, and has had his book featured in the Radical Reading Room (2019) project at Studio Museum Harlem.

Fig. 56 Position of Bearers, 2010 From the series 'In Case of Emergency' Archival Pigment Print 30 x 40 inches Edition of 3 + 2 A.P.

Runaway Slave, 2020 Archival Pigment Print 40 x 60 inches Edition of 5 + 2 A.P.