Interviews by Brainard Carey

Tannaz Farsi’s practice straddles sculpture, installation and image making allowing her to work within a serial structure to create interdependencies in meaning. She uses organic materials such as flowers and plants, creates spatial compositions from light, air, words and continually engages with the history and specificity of objects to critically address broader socio-political systems through both an analytical and poetic framework. Farsi’s research draws from historic cultural objects, feminist histories, and theories of displacement evidenced by long standing colonialist and authoritarian interventions into daily life to complicate the network of relations around conception of memory, history, identity and geography.

Farsi’s work has been exhibited at venues including SFAC Galleries, San Francisco; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Disjecta Art Center, Portland; Linfield Gallery McMinnville, ; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; and The Sculpture Center, Cleveland. She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Studios at Mass MOCA, Santa Fe Art Institute and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Her work has been supported through grants and awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, University of Oregon and the Ford Family Foundation. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014 and was named the twenty-eighth Bonnie Bronson Fellow in 2019. Born in Iran, Farsi lives and works in Eugene, OR where she is on the faculty at the University of Oregon.

The Names [state III], 2019, powder coated steel

Tyrrany stops life., 2109, Iranian rug, silica grit, aluminum, archival ink jet print, polyester film, dried tulip petals

Steven L. Bridges, photo by Eat Pomegranate Photography

Steven L. Bridges is a curator, art historian, and writer based in Lansing, Michigan. Currently he holds the position of Associate Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU Broad). His present research and curatorial interests focus on the intersection of social, racial, and environmental justice, as well as the relationship between art, geopolitics, and scientific inquiry. Most recently at the MSU Broad, Bridges curated the major exhibitions Katrín Sigurðardóttir (2019–20) and Oscar Tuazon: Water School (2019), and co-curated the first two-person exhibition of the work of Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, titled Michigan Stories (2017–18). Other notable projects include Spirit Molecule (2019), a highly experimental project initiated by artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Phillip Andrew Lewis to develop a moss garden of genetic memorials; and Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint, a residency project for which artist Jan Tichy worked with Lansing and Flint-area community members in response to the Flint water crisis. His essays and articles have been published in numerous journals and magazines, including Seismopolite, Art & the Public Sphere, Dispatch, Live Arts Almanac, and Art & Education Papers, as well as exhibition catalogues and other online and print media. In 2017 he was named a curatorial fellow at the FACE Foundation.

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, photo Courtesy MSU Broad

Katrín Sigurðardóttir installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2019. Photo: Eat Pomegranate Photography.

Kat Larson defines herself as a healer, seer, seeker, and human and is devoted to exploring universal energy and awareness through her healing art practice.

Kat is a reiki master, qigong student, intuitive guide, and creative.

She is committed to providing healing to her community via her practice, which also includes her art that spans across plastic and digital surfaces. All relationships and artifacts of her practice are examples of communication between Conduit and Source.

They Pray For Us ( The Ghost at Standing Rock), Archival Ink Jet print on Moab Paper, 18” x 24”, 2016

Untitled, Still from Video Painting, Variable dimensions, Loop, 2019

Self-portrait mask, Fir, 2000

Roger Wing was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1968, the middle child of two educators. He studied at UC Santa Cruz, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Montana.

As well as carving wood, his primary medium, Wing has travelled the world carving ice, snow and sand. Among the most influential experiences of Wing’s life were five weeks spent in Japan studying Buddhist and traditional wood carvings and two summers learning to carve marble in the studio of Manuel Neri, in Carrara, Italy. Wing’s family, home and studio are in West Philadelphia where he is part of a vibrant arts community.

The Othering of Eve, Paulownia, 2019

Sculpting ice at Changchun World Sculpture Park, 2018.

Maui has been Dick Nelson's home since 1975, when he arrived as the Director of the Wailea Arts Center. Hawaii was not new to him, for his family had moved to Hawaii from Sodus, N.Y. when he was five years old. He graduated from Punahou School, received his bachelor’s degree in art from the California College of Arts and Crafts, served as a Marine lieutenant in Korea, and returned to accept the position of Art Department Chairman at Punahou. During his twenty-two years with the school, he spent his summers painting watercolors.

A sabbatical leave at Yale provided Dick with a once-in-a-lifetime experience to take the Josef Albers color course. There has been no greater influence on his educational career, and the residual benefits are very much in evidence today. He earned his master’s degree during his second sabbatical at Ohio State University.

He now pursues his own career in painting and teaching. His days are currently divided between these two loves. He has brought a color process to watercolor painting which he discovered while working with printers. By incorporating the same three primary colors used in printing, he was able to paint the full range of colors in what he calls his Tri-hue palette. As a result of this approach, Dick developed a Tri-hue teaching and painting device. Although his teaching is primarily done in his studio today, he has participated in numerous workshops nationally and in Canada.

To order his CD on color, with critique, email him here - [email protected].

Learn more through his video tutorials here.

Clare Island, 11x17” Watercolor

Source, 22x30” Watercolor

Josephine Halvorson makes paintings on-site, face to face with an object in its environment. Often no more than an arm’s length away, she detects variations in texture, light, and temperature, transcribing these perceptions through the medium of paint. The result is an intimate portrait of the object, capturing both a natural likeness as well as the often unseen or overlooked character of her chosen subject.

Halvorson holds a BFA from The Cooper Union (2003) and an MFA from Columbia University (2007). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna (2003 - 4), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2009), and was a fellow at the French Academy in Rome (2014 - 15). This fall, her work is on view at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston as part of The James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition.

Halvorson’s work has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. This past spring, Halvorson made a body of work in Matanzas, Cuba which was exhibited a part of the Havana Biennial. In 2016, she exhibited large scale sculptures at Storm King Art Center and in 2015 had her first museum survey exhibition, "Slow Burn" at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC. Her work is represented by Sikkema Jenkins and Co. in New York and has been written about widely in a variety of art publications.

Halvorson is also a teacher and holds the position of Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She has also taught at the Skowhegan school of painting and sculpture (2018), Yale University school of art (2010-2016), Paint School (2018), among many other institutions.

Josephine Halvorson, Ground View: Debris, Gouache and site material on panel, 32 x 32 inches, 2019, Photo by Stewart Clements

Photo Captions Josephine Halvorson Posed, Oil on linen, 25 x 17 inches, 2017, Photo by Stewart Clements

Born in Tokyo and raised in Los Angeles, Ichiro Irie is a visual artist, curator, director of the artist-run-space JAUS in Los Angeles, and founding member of the curatorial collective QiPO. Irie received his B.A. from University of California, Santa Barbara and his M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University. After completing his MFA, Irie went to Mexico City on a Fulbright fellowship, and between the years 2002 and 2007 he founded and edited the contemporary art publication RiM magazine.

As an artist, Irie has exhibited his work in galleries and museums internationally. Solo shows include DENK gallery, Los Angeles; Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City; and eitoeiko gallery, Tokyo; and Sam Francis gallery Santa Monica. Group exhibitions include The German Way of Life at Haus am Dom, Frankfurt am Main, Germany;,To Travel With Glasses at Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan; the Pacific Standard Time exhibition, Transpacific Borderlands at Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles; Revision Glocal Review at CECUT, Tijuana, Chockablock at UAM, Long Beach; and The Crystal Jungle at Museo del Chopo, Mexico City. As of February 2019, Irie, with fellow QiPO member Laura Reséndiz has been organizing QiPO Fair, an international art fair in Mexico City focused on artist-run initiatives. His work and curatorial activies have been published in LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, Artillery, and Los Angeles Times among others. Irie currently teaches at Oxnard College and Ryman Arts.

"Impermanence 2" 2017 , Permanent marker and white acrylic on canvas, 80 x 48 inches

"Modernman" 2017, Broken sunglass lenses on mannequin, Dimensions variable

Jennifer Martin (b. 1990) is a London-based fine artist working with moving image, photography, installation and text. Her work operates in part as interventions and articulations of social-racial dynamics and lived experiences.

A driving question of Martin's recent work involves the role of art and media in the social and psychological construction of race and citizenship and its intersection with agency, nostalgia, and identification. In working with performers for moving image she employs a methodology of improvisation, and negotiation of narrative in unpacking character, language and context.

Martin is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2018) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2013). She was awarded the Stuart Croft Foundation Education Award 2018, is artist-in-residence at Kingsgate Workshops 2019/20, and part of the FLAMIN Fellowship 2019.

Teeth by Jennifer Martin, produced by b.Dewitt in collaboration with Primary, 2019, Photo by Reece Straw

Channel 6 by Jennifer Martin, Turf Projects, 2019, Photo by Tim Bowditch

“After Illusion”, Eiman Elgibreen ©farrenkopf

“After Illusion” Saudi Arabia Pavilion, Eiman Elgibreen, Curator, Zahrah Al Ghamdi, Artist

The pavilion curator Eiman Elgibreen, the assistant professor at the Princess Nourah University in Riyadh, says: “[Al Ghamdi] starts from a medium that recalls abandoned spaces from her childhood, and reshapes it to give it a new life by making it part of her present space, and thus her future memory… The other reason for choosing Al Ghamdi is her brilliant ability to turn traditional crafts into contemporary art without compromising on any aspect.”

Zahrah Al Ghamdi, artist. ©farrenkopf

“May You Live in Interesting Times”, the title of the 58th Venice Biennale brought for the first time in its 124 year history an exhibition representing 53% women solo artists. Of that historic change, the Saudi Arabia Pavilion returned to the Venice Biennale after an eight year hiatus with artist Zahrah Al Ghamdi and curator Eiman Elgibreen “After Illusion”. The country was last represented at the 2011 Biennale.

Zahrah Al Ghamdi represented her new work in the Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale 2019. She is known for her site-specific installations that are assembled using natural materials such as sand, rocks and leather. For the exhibition “After Illusion”, Al Ghamdi demonstrates the intimate tactile encounter she undergoes in the process of making the work that exhibits her master craftsmanship. The land artist starts from local leather, a medium that recalls abandoned spaces from her childhood and reshapes it in 52,000 pieces. The exhibition aims to recognize, reconnect, and revisit a feeling where one tries to explore something new but rather familiar; a step into an imaginary world created by the artist to seek comfort in her journey towards self-realization.

"After Illusion” is curated by Eiman Elgibreen, to reflect on the history of Saudi Arabia and its identity. The team is guided by Project Advisor, Nada Shabout. The title “After Illusion” is inspired by a line from an ancient Arabic poem written by Zuhayr bin Abī Sūlmā (b.520 – d.609), in which he described his struggle to recognize what was “home” after being away for twenty years. Only ‘illusion’ helped the eighty-year-old poet recognize it – a state of mind that we fight during our search for the ‘truth’ but somehow it paves a path to it. Old Arabic poetry is cherished by many Saudis as an important substitute source of ‘truth’, inspiration and a resort for those who seek assurance.

Eiman Elgibreen states: “Saudis have long been living in interesting times. Their complicated sociocultural history has forced them, and others, to be seen as interesting. There is a sense of lost cultural and historical agency due to the hegemony of global discourse. Their significance has been encapsulated within two narrow historical moments: the emergence of Islam and the discovery of oil, leaving them confused on how to perceive their history outside of those moments, particularly with the absence of visual evidence.”

“After Illusion” is an exhibition that offers an attempt to meditate on the value of ‘uncertainty’ in opening new doors to self-awareness and transformation.”

Saudi Arabia Pavilion, “After Illusion”.    ©farrenkopf

Kali Spitzer is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, British Columbia) on her father's side and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania on her mother's side. She is from the Yukon and grew up on the West Coast of British Columbia in Canada on unceded Coast Salish Territory. She is a trans disciplinary artist who mainly works with film - 35mm, 120 and wet plate collodion process using an 8x10 camera. Her work includes portraits, figure studies, and photographs of her people, ceremonies, and culture. Her work has been exhibited and recognized internationally. Spitzer recently received a Reveal Indigenous Art Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation in Canada and was featured in the National Geographic and Photo Life magazine in 2018.

At the age of 20, Kali moved back north to spend time with her Elders, and to learn how to hunt, fish, trap, tan moose and caribou hides and bead. Kali documents these practices with a sense of urgency, highlighting their vital cultural significance. She focuses upon cultural revitalization through her art whether in the medium of photography, ceramics, tanning hides or hunting. She views all of these practices as art and as part of an exploration of self.

I want to extend my gratitude to all of the people who have trusted me to photograph them in such intimate ways.

Mussi Cho

"Indigenous Femme Queer Photographer Kali Spitzer ignites the spirit of our current unbound human experience with all the complex histories we exist in, passed down through the trauma inflicted/received by our ancestors. Kali's photographs are intimate and unapologetic and make room for growth and forgiveness while creating a space where we may share the vulnerable and broken parts of our stories which are often overlooked, or not easy to digest for ourselves or society."

-Ginger Dunnill, Creator and Producer of Broken Boxes Podcast (which features interviews with indigenous and other engaged artists).

Audrey Siegl, 2019, Vancouver, British Columbia, canada,C-print from scanned Tintype

Holland Andrews, 2018, Banff, Alberta canada, C-print from scanned Tintype