Interviews by Brainard Carey

Whether with chisel, cast shadow, plumb bob, or the tow-line of a kite, Erdim’s practice investigates the intersection of projection, place, and materiality to question axioms of architectural imagination. His work has been exhibited recently at the Constance Gallery at Graceland University (IA, USA), Yellow Door Gallery (IA, USA), the Spartanburg Art Museum (SC, USA), the Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di Metropoliz (Rome, Italy), Windor (Madrid, Spain), and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen, Denmark). He was the co-founder of Flash Atölye, an experimental project space for art and architecture in İzmir, Turkey. This work has been supported by the Daniel J. Huberty Fellowship and the Center for Excellence in Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University, and by residencies at I-Park (CT, USA), Vermont Studio Center (USA), Babayan Culture House (Turkey), the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest (KY, USA), and Heima (Iceland). Awards include the 2014 Founders Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, and a 2016 Santo Foundation Award for Individual Artists. He has a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from the Cooper Union, and a Master of Architecture Degree from the University of Virginia. Erdim is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University.

The book mentioned in the interview: Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander (2007) and Rovelli’s The Order of Time (2019).

Kite Choir Sounding: December 25, 2020. Waterworks Park, Des Moines. from Firat Erdim on Vimeo.

Still from Kite Choir Sounding, June 12, 2019 cookie can resonator reels

Still from Kite Choir, Sounding, May 5, 2019, Wood plate ribbon reel

Sophie Grant is an artist using painting, drawing, collage, and processes of transference and erasure to create energetic abstractions. In her work, foregrounds and backgrounds fluctuate with compositions that challenge depth perception. Pours of paint and crusty stains coagulate, evoking erosion and relief. Hand built ceramics punctuate fields of flatness, adding dimension to the rigid support of a wall. Her recent drawings are graphite rubbings that explore temporary physical and psychological sites through the echoes of histories embedded in object surfaces. These works grapple with ideas of boundaries and containers, and question what delineates the periphery of objects. Sophie's practice culls and compresses disjointed gestures, allowing shapes, digits, and surface variations to become units of measurement and unknowable markers. The result is a materially varied set of transcribed bodily perceptions, grounded in the subject of landscape.

Sophie Grant was born in Santa Cruz, California and lives and works in New York City. She received her BA in Painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008, completed her MFA at Hunter College in 2015, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015. She has been a former participant in Shandaken's Paint School, The Hercules Art Studio Program, and The Keyholder Program at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York, NY, as well as a former resident at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, FL, The Pajama Factory in Williamsport, PA, and Painting's Edge in Idyllwild, CA. Her work has been exhibited at Flag Art Foundation, Spring Break, Underdonk and Y2k Gallery among others. Publications include The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Artist's Institute Hunted Book Series, and New American Paintings.

Hope Mountain, Graphite and pigment stick on canvas, 52”x 39”, 2020

Burned-over District, Graphite on canvas, 60” x 45”, 2020

An award-winning poet and playwright, Josepha Gutelius made a radical switch to visual art in 2015 — inspired by an impulse to continue writing on the canvas, to convert narratives into visions. She usually works in series, each painting an interdependent expression of a particular theme. Themes such as “Shape of Water,” “School Days,” “Theater Pieces,”  “Roman Elegies,” and most recently, “Inhabiting New Earth.” Her series “Silence of Nowhere” received a generous grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.  Two of her paintings are currently on view at the Albany Institute of History and Art, selected by Susan Cross, senior curator at Mass MoCA.

She lives in Saugerties, New York with her husband, whom she met at Salvador’s house in Cadaques, Spain, in 1971.

Images of her recent work can be seen on Instagram #josephagutelius.

This is the book discussed in the interview: The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Studio View

Studio View

Mark Gerard Brogan was born in London where he studied art as an under- and post-graduate at Goldsmiths college. For over 15 years he has been living in Belgrade working as an artist and translator. As a resident in Belgrade – a foreigner in the “relaxed”, “bipolar” position of belonging – in his watercolour paintings and collages he reads society’s problems from the cracks, fractures and overlapping of socio-politico-historical phenomena.

He first exhibited in Serbia in 2010 at the Belgrade Cultural Centre showing an experimental film about an artist-run telephone call-centre. In 2017 he exhibited the large-scale photo-wallpaper “Unforgetting Aelita” in the courtyard of the Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković, and more recently participated in the 13th International Aquarelle Biennial in Zrenjanin, Serbia and his exhibition “Shadowy Stories” was held at Remont Independent Art Space in Belgrade. His works are in amongst others the collections of Deutsche Telekom and the InterSpace Association, Sofia, Bulgaria  - Transitland. Video art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009.

30 Juin 1960 Zaire Independent installation

Between Worlds

Sutthirat Supaparinya lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Her works encompass a wide variety of mediums such as installation, objects, still and moving images. Through her works, she questions and interprets public information and reveals or question what’s structure affect her/us as a national/global citizen. Her recent projects focus on history and the impact of human activities on other humans and the landscape. Sutthirat seeks to cultivate freedom of expression through her art practice.

As a visual artist among the art community in Chiang Mai, she has participated in the founding and operation of CAC – Chiangmai Art Conversation since 2013. She was a director of Asian Culture Station (ACS) in the year 2016-2019 when CAC partnered with the Japan Foundation Asia Center Tokyo to establish the project. CAC aims to promote contemporary art in Chiang Mai while ACS activated Asian culture and its network. Sutthirat earned a BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University and a postgraduate diploma in Media Arts from Hochschule Fuer Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany. She is a 2005 Imaging Our Mekong media fellowship and a 2010 Asian Cultural Council fellowship at International Studio & Curatorial Program – ISCP in New York City. She was selected to participate in the International Creator Residency Program at the Tokyo Wonder Site Aoyama in 2012, Foundation Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, NRW, Germany in 2013 and Wellington Asia Residency Exchange, New Zealand in 2015. She was nominated for the Prudential Eye Awards 2016 shortlist in ‘Best Emerging Artist Using Digital/Video’, Singapore. Winners of Institut Français for an artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France in 2018.

Museums and galleries that have featured Sutthirat’s work include Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Mori Art Museum, Japan, Jim Thompson Art Center, Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Gallery Ver, Thailand, Queensland Art Gallery and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Australia, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA, Singapore Art Museum and ArtScience Museum, Singapore, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong and Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Poland.

International festivals and biennials; Koganecho Bazzar 2011 in Yokohama, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2012 and 2018, Japan, EVA International [Ireland’s Biennial] in Limerick City, Ireland, 12th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, Cairo Biennale 13 in Cairo, Egypt and Biennale Jogja Equator #5, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The highlight of upcoming exhibitions such as After Hope: Videos of Resistance, the video program under #MuseumFromHome and engage with art at a distance policy, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, USA [Open from Spring 2021] and The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia [27 November 2021 – 25 April 2022]. Recently, she is a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2021, the one-year artist in residence in Berlin, Germany.

When Need Moves the Earth, synchronized 3 – channel video, 2014 ©Sutthirat Supaparinya

Ten Places in Tokyo, synchronized 10 – channel video, 2016, ©Sutthirat Supaparinya

These are the books that she is reading which were mentioned in the interview -

Here are the links to books that Sutthirat Supaparinya is reading: Most of them are old books and a rare find.

[1] https://www.se-ed.com/product/Pirates-of-Tarutao-The.aspx?no=9789748904696&nomobile=true

[2] เสียงแผ่นดิน และอ้อยในปากช้าง

[3] https://m.se-ed.com/Product/Detail/2229090006237

[4] เส้นทางยุคศรีอาริยะ บันทึกกบฏ

Craig Santos Perez is a Pacific islander poet originally from Guam.

He is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies.

He teaches in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Manoa.

The book mentioned in the interview was Habitat Threshold.

Habitat Threshold (2020)

unincorporated territory [lukao] (2017)

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.

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.

Lunar - Photo by Sanja Tusek

Slaven Kosanovic, better known as Lunar, is a Croatian graphic and street artist, philosopher and interdisciplinary person; coming to both music and art as a child, Lunar entered what would become a career as an artist in 1989 when he first picked up a spray paint can.  Thirty years later, he is a unique living witness and participant in graffiti’s evolution since then as both a subculture and an art form, and the transformations of graffiti, hip hop, and electronic music subcultures in supporting one another towards their current mainstream popularity.

Lunar has always been pushed by curiosity, discovery, and creativity.  Around the time he realized he probably couldn’t make it as a paleontologist or natural scientist, a la David Attenborough -- his childhood dream -- Lunar was also fascinated by graffiti, hip hop culture, and discovering and collecting every possible form of music that he could find.  Entering the world of graffiti was a way for Lunar to assert the other, non-scientific side, of his identity as an interdisciplinary artist, to make sense of the world and find a place in it. As he began painting and establishing his network throughout Croatia, he was inspired by painters and musicians from other cities and countries who were building their lives in pursuit of the most idealistic dreams; by the early 1990’s Lunar was painting with them and friends throughout Europe, while offering them insider knowledge of where and how to paint in Croatia, and places to stay when others came to Eastern Europe.

Lunar describes street cats as confident, cheeky, independent, and symbolic of the streets; he also pulled his first artistic inspiration from his cat, Jinx.  His artistic career, built largely around continual reinvention of his Catso character, has also been much like that of a street cat: charting his own path, making his own rules, and constantly pushing his boundaries of creativity.  Thus, by the mid-1990’s, in seeking to expand beyond graffiti and nomadism, and to push the limits of his own creativity, Lunar entered a career in graphic design (while continuing graffiti); recently, he has also started hosting his own national-level radio show in Zagreb and DJing, both as a way of sharing his passion and excitement for hip hop and electronic music that has always inspired and propelled him as an artist.

Lunar’s constant search to discover and learn from other peoples’ experience, perspectives, and creative methodologies has led him to create art on every continent, and to be included in global graffiti publications including Graffiti world-Street art from 5 continents, 100 European graffiti writers,World Piecebook, Street art & Graffiti Europe, Street Art Graffiti Guide Paris, Graffiti Planet, Style is a Message, Painted Walls Havana, Munich Walls, Street Art Amsterdam, Street Art Zagreb, 400ml, The Book of Tags, and Cinco -- 5 Years of Calle Libre.  Beyond the world of graffiti, Lunar’s work and ability to independently turn creativity into a successful career have also earned him features in Playboy, Forbes, Backspin, DJ Mag, Stylefile, Graphotism, Xplicit Grafx, Bomber, Urban Roots, and Code Red, and invitations to speak at TEDx Zagreb 2015 and CreArt Encounter 2019 in Aveiro, Portugal.

Lunar’s new book “From Zagreb with Love” is hotly anticipated as one of the first histories written of graffiti as a clandestine, global, multidisciplinary art movement in Eastern Europe, which also maps its parallel development with rap and electronic music, written from the inside by one of its first practitioners. “From Zagreb with Love” will be launched at QRU in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in collaboration with Street Art Museum Amsterdam, on 16 August 2019.

Rhytm of the Saints - Osijek 2016 - Photo by Samir Kurtagic

Blushing - Paris 2017 - Photo by Ivo Kosanovic

Ward Shelley works as an artist in New York and Connecticut. He is interested in constructed worlds and intersecting narratives; how they create, mediate and inform each other. He wants to know how things really work.

Shelley specializes in large projects that freely mix architecture and performance. For more than a decade, he has been collaborating with Alex Schweder, using experimental architecture to explore the dance between the designed environment and its consequences. Since 2007, the duo have designed, built, and lived in (or on) seven structures, all of them in locations where the public are invited not only to witness, but also to actively engage with the artists in direct dialogue about their practice—an activity that has coalesced into what they call “performance architecture.”

Shelley also works on diagramatic paintings: information-based timelines on culture-related subjects and historical postmortems. He frequently works with Douglas Paulson on installations and environments that attempt to turn mind, text, and meaning inside out (for a better look). They created the “The Last Library” project for Spaces in 2015.

Shelley’s work has been exhibited in more than 10 countries and is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Shelley received a Painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York.

Information on the book mentioned in the interview - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is a 2012 social psychology book by Jonathan Haidt, in which the author describes human morality as it relates to politics and religion.Haidt presents moral foundations theory, and applies it to the political beliefs of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians in the US.

In Orbit; 2014 - A collaboration of Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley in Brooklyn. As a performance, the artists lived on the wheel for 9 days and nights. Walking together turns the wheel and brings them their beds, bathroom, kitchen and desks. photo credit Double Cyclops

Work, Spend, Forget; 2013 - In this diagram, Shelley traces the parallel histories of consumerism, manufacturing, and marketing using the form of a dissected frog to suggest their effect on society. photo courtesy of Pierogi Gallery.

The Room Where It Happened; 2020 - A diorama that imagines a series of rooms in which plans are made to alter and direct public opinion for political and economic purposes. An immersive yet diminishing environment, the rooms contain charts, files, books, and notes, all which have a certain historical resonance. Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson. photo credit: Carlton Bright

George Abraham (they/he) is a Palestinian american poet from Jacksonville, FL. They are the author of Birthright (Button Poetry) and the specimen’s apology (Sibling Rivalry Press).

He is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Boston Foundation, and a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI).

Their poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, Mizna, and elsewhere.

He currently resides on stolen Massachusett land, where he is a Bioengineering PhD candidate at Harvard University, and teaches in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Order Birthright, in print or audiobook form, from Button Poetry: bit.ly/georgebirthright