Interviews by Brainard Carey

The portrait is R. Yean, Sea forest at Mondulkiri province, Cambodia, ©Norm Phanith, 2017

H.R.H. (His Rebel/Revolt Highness) The Articurizer (Art[ist] Curator, Articulator/Writer, Researcher, and Art Advocate)

A native of Battambang, Reaksmey Yean is a self-proclaimed art advocate, an early-career art curator, writer, and researcher. Currently, he is a program director and co-founder of Silapak Trotchaek Pneik, a contemporary art space by YK Art House. He is also a part-time lecturer at Phnom Penh International Institute of the Art (PPIIA). Reaksmey is a research affiliate at Center for Khmer Studies and a Co-Investigator on Phase 2 Large Grant project ‘Contemporary Arts Making and Creative Expression Among Young Cambodians.’

Yean is an Alphawood scholar (SOAS, the University of London for Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art – in Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian Art). He was an exchange scholar at the Institute of Southeast Asian Affairs, Chiang Mai University. He is an inaugural SEAsia Award Scholar (2017) of LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, an Asian Cultural Council fellow (2018), and a beneficiary of Dr. Karen Mcleod Adair grant for MA in Asian Art Histories at LASALLE College of the Arts.

Yean was a curator for creative programs at Java Creative Café, Phnom Penh. Prior, he served several senior posts, including an Assistant to School of Performing Arts, at Phare Ponleu Selpak, a multi-disciplinary arts center, where he received his early education. He is also a founding father of a defunct collective named Trotchaek Pneik, a cultural and artistic collective based in Battambang.

Yean is interested in multi-disciplinary practices (Film, Visual, and Performing Arts). As an Art Advocate, Yean is involved in the promotion of art and culture and their histories within contemporary Cambodia via curatorial practices, art criticism, and cultural pundit. As a scholar, Yean is concerned with Buddhist Arts, Contemporary and Modern Arts, Southeast Asia, Cultural Diplomacy, and Post-colonial theory.

The books mentioned in the interview were: Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, Of Grammatology, and The Truth in Painting.

Dinh Q. Lê, Splendor and Darkness #32, 2017, Foiling and screen-print on Stonehenge paper, cut, weaved and burned, 221 x330 cm, Courtesy of Reaksmey Yean

Peat Szilagyi and Umico Niwa

Umico Niwa is currently residing in Richmond Virginia, having just received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University. She recently had a solo show, Fruiting Bodies, at the American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings in Tucson, Arizona. She has also been invited to lead a workshop, together with her partner, “Meet Your Gremlin, Make Your Gremlin” at Recess Gallery in Brooklyn, New York City. Umico and Peat will be having a joint show, Solar Coochie, at the end of this month at Holding Contemporary, Portland, Oregon.

Niwa’s practice explores the way Western notions of personhood subsume human life into constructs of sexuality and gender, overlooking the various other modes of unbridled existence: plant, microbial. fungal, animal, celestial bodies. Her speculative medical papers propose novel forms of body modification to combat gender dysphoria as well as playfully explore the possible efficacy of including fecal matter transplants as part of hormone replacement therapy for transgender individuals.

Collaborative work made for the show, Solar Coochie

Collaborative solar powered work made for the show, Solar Coochie, “Moon in the Spoon” being tested.

Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space

Colombian / American artist Jamie Martinez immigrated to Florida at the age of twelve from South America. He attended The Miami International University of Art and Design then moved to New York to continue his fine art education at The Fashion Institute of Technology and The Students Art League in NYC.

He is the publisher of Arte Fuse, which is a contemporary art platform focused on art shows that are currently on display, interviews and studio visits with today’s top artists from NY and all over the world. He is also the founder and director of The Border Project Space, which was recently featured in Hyperallergic’s top 15 shows of 2018.

Jamie’s work has been featured in multiple important outlets like a half-hour personal TV interview with NTN24 (Nuestra Tele Noticias, a major Spanish TV channel) for their show Lideres (translation leaders), Hyperallergic, Yale University radio WYBCX (radio interview), Whitehot Magazine, Good Day New York (TV interview),  Fox News (TV interview), The Observer, Whitewall Magazine, Interview Magazine, CNN, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Bedford + Bowery, and many more. Martinez has shown in Berlin, Brussels, Spain, Russia, Canada, Miami, California, and numerous galleries in New York City including Petzel Gallery, Galerie Richard, Whitebox NY, The Gabarron Foundation, Flowers Gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC, Foley Gallery, Rush Gallery and many more. He also participated in a group show curated by Vida Sabbaghi at the Queens Museum which was very well received by the museum and the press.

Liminality curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space, installation

The border project space curated by Jamie Martinez installation

Verge curated by Jamie Martinez at The Border Project Space

Desi Mundo was interviewed last year, and is an Oakland-based spray paint educator, hip-hop cultural diplomat and the founder of the Community Rejuvenation Project, a pavement to policy mural organization that has produced more than 250 murals, throughout the Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally. His mural with Pancho Peskador, the “Universal Language” galvanized the Oakland community in the struggle against gentrification resulting in $20 million in community benefits, as documented in the acclaimed documentary film “Alice Street.” Desi’s legacy as an educator and youth worker in K-12 schools spans two decades. He received the “Rising Leaders” Fellowship from the Youth Leadership Institute in 2005 and has been awarded the Individual Artist grant from the City of Oakland eight times. Desi recently completed “AscenDance,” a 91 ft. tall acrylic mural on Oakland’s Greenlining Institute, with an all-woman all-star team of brush painters.

AscenDance in Production (photo by Eric Arnold)

The complete mural getting several layers of clear coat for lasting protection.

photo by Ephraim Asili

Greg de Cuir Jr is an independent curator, writer and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia.

 

 

 

 

Yowshien Kuo was educated in both the U.S. and Taiwan and completed his MFA in 2014 from Fontbonne University. Kuo is an active exhibiting artist living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a co-owner of the artist run space, Monaco and has recently exhibited with Superdutchess in NYC, LVL3 Chicago, Terrain Exhibitions, Granite City’s Art and Design District, Projects Plus in St. Louis, and Counterpublic with The Luminary in St. Louis. Yowshien has been an artist in residence with Paul ArtSpace in St. Louis, a recipient of Regional Arts Commission support grant and Critical Mass for the Visual Arts award. His work has appeared in publications that include New American Paintings and The Seen Journal Chicago. He currently holds teaching appointments at St. Louis Community College at Meramec, Washington University’s – University College, and Maryville University in St. Louis.

The books mentioned in the interview are Hitler's American Model by James Q. Whitman and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

Yowshien Kuo But Victor Denies the Similarities Between Himself and the Monster Acrylic, gouache, chalk, Carrara marble, bone ash, and glass on canvas 2019 28” X 30”

Yowshien Kuo Slipped in Hope Acrylic, gouache, chalk, Carrara marble, bone ash, and glass on canvas 2020 29” X 30”

Ljiljana Radošević was born in Belgrade (Serbia) in 1978. She got MA in Art History at the University of Belgrade by defending thesis about appearance and development of graffiti in Belgrade 1996-2005. She started her research in the year 2000 and continued to document art works and interview graffiti and street artists until present day. During her second MA studies in Management in Culture she had an opportunity to do her internship at the most important comics festival in Europe FIBD Angouleme and consequently wrote her thesis about it. After working in the field for several years she started her PH.D. studies at the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland) with the thesis under the title Understanding Street Art; A Study of European Street Art. At the moment she is in the final stages of writing but has managed to initiate in collaboration with her colleagues projects such as www.streetartwalksbelgrade.com and www.urbanheritagehub.com (not active yet).

The books mentioned in the interview are The Dresden Files, and the authors Ursula K. LaGuin and Andrzej Sapkowski. As well as the series called Urban Shaman.

Photo taken in 2016 and we see a stencil by Vudemn paying respect to Leonard Cohen and it says "Singer must die but the song is forever." And the colorful side is done by Vlica.

Dorćol Platz (@dorcolplatz) which references a traditional Balkan dance called “kolo”. Made and photographed in 2016. . . Artists: Das Drogen (@das_drogen), Nikola (@kori.nikola), Neon (@neon_blck), Linnch (@linnchlinnch), Leaf Kid (@alekleaf) and Zez (@zez_lunatic).

Katarina Radovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She studied History of Art at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK in the 1990’s and acquired the BA Degree in Photography from the Academy of Arts ‘BK’ in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2006.

As a free-lance artist she has participated in a number of solo and collective exhibitions and festivals in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Egypt, Japan, Senegal, USA, Israel, etc.

She received the Kultur Kontakt artist-in-residence grant in Vienna, Austria, in 2007; the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) grant in 2009 for the project Until Death Do Us Part; and the artist-in-residence grant in Malta by the Fondazzjoni Kreattività in 2019 for the project Palettes.

Her works are in: the Photography Collection EROSION (Lithuania), the TELENOR Collection of Contemporary Art (Serbia), the Museum of the City of Belgrade, the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb (Croatia), the Museum of African Art in Belgrade and the Imago Mundi BENETTON Collection (Italy).

She moves fluidly across photographic fields, trying to trace the link between reality and fiction, the real world and the socially and culturally originated visions of reality. Her photographic work consists of unique researches into identity, (self)-presentation, human relationships and communication, as well as cultural differences, and is often permeated with theatre and humour. She is also interested in design, publishing, translation and curatorial work.

The two major publications of her works are: Until Death Do Us Part, self-published monograph, Belgrade, 2011 and When You've Stopped Combing Me, I'll Stop Hating You, Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2016.

Camera in Quarantine #1

I'm Going To Live A Hundred Years

I'm Going To Live A Hundred Years

Influenced by color theory, design history and international traditions in geometric abstraction, I grew up in a household where my mother was a women’s clothing designer and my stepfather was an architect. These two very personal visions – my mother’s love of textiles and construction and my stepfather’s introduction to the classics of modernism - had a deep impact on my development. Their influences percolated up in intriguing ways. A key point in my work is color as communication - an associative, subjective relationship, based on a lifetime of visual memories. Rejecting the notion of abstract art as a “universal language” - my work hints at pictographic signs, logo-grams, alphabetic scripts and cuneiform writing. I am interested in the highly subjective responses to composition and color.

During the past two years, I have begun to expand the parameters of my work to include hand-printed textile installations, outdoor projects and sculptural works. Having long employed printmaking techniques in my paintings and frequently making reference to textiles and textile design, my linen installations bring together several of the themes in my work into a single piece. With the sculptural work, I have begun working with vitreous enamel on steel. This particular material combination is fantastic for its luminous glass-like quality, intense colors and its extreme durability.

Elise Ferguson lives in Brooklyn and works in Queens, NY.

For more information click here and here.

Privet 2019 Silk screen ink, Acrylic paint, linen 84”x 104”x 26”

Triumph 2019 40”x60” Pigmented plaster on panel

Fernando Martín Velazco is a Mexican writer, theorist, and multidisciplinary researcher. His work focuses on the field of expanded arts and performative literature. Since 2015, he is the captain and founder of the Stultifera Navis Institutom, an organization dedicated to the artistic, scientific, and humanistic research through creative expeditions. In 2017 he started the cycle "The Leviathan Games" (2017-2020) carrying out multidisciplinary research with grey whales, a project later supported by the grants program Art, Science & Technology 2018 from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was curator of the art exhibition “Joy of the Whale”, presented in LA Film Boutique in Los Angeles, California (2019), and coordinator of “Fusion/Fision. Intensive poetic-body research workshop with gray whales” in Baja, Mexico (2020). He is part of the 2020 Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

Learn more on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook.

Reading of the "Maritime ode" (2019) Site-specific intervention part of "The Leviathan Games"

"Meyihél" (2020) Photography, part of "The Leviathan Games"