Interviews by Brainard Carey

This is the second interview with Vasiliki, the one can be heard by clicking here.

Vasiliki Antonopoulou was born in Greece and raised in Saudi Arabia, two locations which re-emerge in her process. Her practice combines text, performance and moving image, to explore notions of displacement and otherness. These manifest in metaphors that create multiple layers delving into the emotional relationships that exists in particular spaces and architecture.

Using a sculptural language, her work queers the process of image editing by challenging the binary format of rough versus sleek moving image. Her outcomes, are visual poems that occupy a space in between where displaced images reflect the notions she works with.

‘Dry’, Film Still, ongoing 

‘Dry’, Film Still, ongoing

author photo credit: Hafiz Hamzah

Jeffrey Yang is the author of three poetry collections Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium.

He is the translator of Bei Dao's autobiography City Gate, Open Up, Liu Xiaobo's June Fourth Elegies, Ahtmajan Osman's Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile, and Su Shi's East Slope. He is also the editor of The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman; Time of Grief: Mourning Poems; and Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions.

Here is a link to recent Hey, Marfa review, also a link to a Vanishing-Line review,and finally a link to Porter's book where the review can be found that was mentioned in the interview.

Cover of Hey, Marfa

photo by by Dejan Golić, 2016

Srđan Tunić is an art historian, freelance curator and cultural manager from Belgrade, Serbia, currently living between Serbia and Montenegro.

From 2010 till 2011 he worked in The Museum of African Art in Belgrade, as a curatorial associate/program animator in the department of education. Since 2012 he has been working as an independent curator, researcher, writer and project manager. As part of Mediterranean Cultural Innovators Network, he took part in projects such as Trans-Cultural Dialogues. Since 2011 he has been working with Civil Association ARTIKAL, Belgrade, on independent project “About and around curating / Kustosiranje”, an educative and research curatorial program, developed with colleague Andrej Bereta.

More recently, together with Ljiljana Radošević, we're working on Street Art Walks Belgrade (STAW BLGRD), popularizing street art and graffiti of Belgrade. Since 2017, he came back to making crafts, inspired by pop culture (fan art), that you can see here. For more info on his professional activities, visit: https://srdjantunic.wordpress.com

At the moment he is reading "On writing well" by William Zinsser and just finished with Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology."

Street Art Walks tour, Belgrade, 2019

Gorbash (The Flights of Dragons), 2018 (starchild’s crafts)

photo by Adrian Pope

Vahni Capildeo is a Trinidadian Scottish writer inspired by other voices, ranging from live Caribbean connexions and an Indian diaspora background to the landscapes where Capildeo travels and lives. Their poetry (seven books and four pamphlets) includes Measures of Expatriation, awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016. Following a DPhil in Old Norse literature, Capildeo has worked in academia; in culture for development, with Commonwealth Writers; and as an Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer. Capildeo held the Judith E. Wilson  Poetry Fellowship and Harper-Wood Studentship at Cambridge, and more recently a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellowship at the University of Leeds.

Feather sculpture and photo for Measures of Expatriation by Elspeth Duncan, cover design by Luke Allan.

The cover design for Venus as a Bear by Luke Allan

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where he has had solo exhibitions of photography in 2005, 2009, and 2013, and will have another in June, 2019. He had a solo exhibition called Innamorato at Pratt Institute in 2018. He has been invited by CECArtslink to do a residency in St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, Russia, in 2019. He received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize in Photography from the American Academy in Rome in 2017/2018.  His 2013 Gitterman exhibition Dialogue with Bolaño was presented at the Museum of Art of the Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 2014. Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001.

In the 1980’s he adapted and directed the writing of artist David Wojnarowicz, which was presented in three venues, in New York and Berlin. He also performed in two Gary Indiana plays with Taylor Mead, Bill Rice, John Heys, and Cookie Mueller.  In London in 1987 he co-wrote the play Call Grandad with Bertie Marshall and directed it at the Old Red Lion Theater.  Recently he has written a full-length play called Dogs Barking in the Deep South.  In 2012, he co-produced the feature film Four, starring Wendell Pierce and directed by Joshua Sanchez.

He has been the recipient of grants from the Penny McCall Foundation, the Peter Reed Foundation, Creative Time, Art Matters, CECArtslink and others.  He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including Darrel Ellis at Art in General; Bearings: the Female Figure at PS122 Gallery; Anatomy, Persona, and the Moment: Experimental 70’s Photographs of Luigi Di Sarro and Linda Salerno: A Selection of Experimental Photographs from the Black Mirror Series at the Camera Club of New York, and Illusione Persistente and Fuggenti Figure at ACTA International in Rome. He has been a contributing editor for Bomb and written feature articles for The New York Times and other publications.

He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), and the International Center of Photography in New York. He has taught workshops in photography extensively in Mexico and Russia. He graduated from Harvard University and grew up in Mississippi.

The author mentioned in the interview is Édouard Louis.

Paola, Mexico City, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches, 2007

Sebastian, Buenos Aires, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches, 2008

Amanda Browder's "Land of Hidden Gems" on display on the HFA building at UNLV In Las Vegas, Nev. on April 5, 2019.

Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York producing large-scale fabric installations for building exteriors and other public sites. She works primarily with the community, and sources all of her material from donations. She has shown nationally, and internationally including at the New Museum, Ideas City Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, FAB Fest in New York City; The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn; University of Alabama at Birmingham AAHD, Birmingham, AL; Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF in Toronto; Mobinale, Prague; Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo; White Columns, NYC; No Longer Empty, Brooklyn. She has been published in books such as Unexpected Art: Chronicle Books and Strange Material; Arsenal Pulp Press. This year she will create a large-scale work as part of Art Prize: Project 1 and was named a Transformation Fellow at UNLV. In 2016, she received her first National Endowment for the Arts grant and worked with the Albright Knox Art Gallery to drape three buildings in Buffalo, NY. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fibers Magazine and she is a founder of the art podcast, badatsports.com.

Book mentioned during the interview were The Art of Gathering: How we Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker and Janesville: An American Story - Book by Amy Goldstein.

Spectral Locus: Clifton Hall and a Public Sewing Day at Starlight Studios in Buffalo, NY, 2016 - Albright Knox Art Gallery + AK Public Art; photo by Tom Loonan

Spectral Locus: Richmond and Ferry Church and 920 Broadway in Buffalo, NY, 2016 - Albright Knox Art Gallery + AK Public Art; photo by Tom Loonan

Lynne Thompson is the author of three chapbooks and won the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for her full-length manuscript, Fretwork, published by the Press in 2019.  She also authored Start With A Small Guitar  and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. She is the recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and Special Mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prizes.

Thompson’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and the New England Review; her prose is included in Jane Cooper, A Radiance of Attention issued by the University of Michigan Press (2019). Follow these links to find two examples of her work: www.poetrynw.org and www.poetryfoundation.org.

Thompson serves as Reviews and Essays Editor for the journal, Spillway, and Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College.

Photo by Danilo Seixas

Sandra Lapage got her MFA from the Maine College of Art in 2013. Sandra has participated in collective and solo exhibitions in Brazil, Europe and the United States, notedly at the Brazilian Embassy in Brussels (2007), at the Ribeirão Preto Art Museum for the 2006 exhibition program, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo in 2012, at the Gowanus Loft (NYC) in 2014 and 2015, at the Blumenau Art Museum and Aura Arte Contemporânea (Sao Paulo) in 2018.

Sandra has resided at various institutions such as the Fondation Château Mercier (Switzerland) and NARS Foundation (NYC) for 6 months in 2014, Elefante Centro Cultural (Brasilia) in 2015, Camac Art Center (France) and Paul Artspace (USA) in 2016, and Massachussets Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017. She will be in residence at Monson Arts in September.

Sandra was a visiting artist at the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia) and Maine College of Art (Portland), United States.

In addition to her solo work, she develops a collaborative work in the collective Eclusa and runs, with ten other artists and designers, the independent art space Vão: a workspace, with classes and experimental exhibitions, in São Paulo, Brazil.

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The books mentioned during the interview are for her work in the collective duo Eclusa, they've been departing from Cyrano de Bergerac's original 1657's "Comical History by Mr de Cyrano Bergerac including The States & Empires of the Moon", Edmond Rostand's 1897 play "Cyrano de Bergerac", Carlo Rovelli's "7 brief lessons on Physics" and "The order of time". And also not mentioned was Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics"

She's also been reading the Documents of Contemporary Art books by the MIT Press (Failure, Nature, Materiality, Sexuality), and rereading Borges' "Book of imaginary beings" where she find titles for her assemblage pieces.

«Sharp Garments for desperate Shamans: Amphisbaena», 2018 Recycled material assemblage Height/Width/Depth :78 x 78 x 11 inches, Photo by Danilo Seixas

«Sharp Garments for desperate Shamans: Bahamut», 2018 Recycled materials and copper wire assemblage Height/Width/Depth : 118 x 87 x 19 inches, Photo by Danilo Seixas

Darren’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, has been showcased in the national publication New American Paintings, and was named “artist to watch” at the Dayton Visual Art Center. He has had solo exhibitions at Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH; Green Line Projects, Philadelphia, PA; Divisible Gallery, Dayton, OH; Cochran Gallery, Dayton, OH; and a two person show at Pratt MWP School of Art Gallery, Utica, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH; Hite Gallery, Louisville, KY; Kelsey Projects, Dayton, OH; Dayton Visual Art Center, Dayton, OH; and was the recipient of the MCACD Fellowship. Upcoming shows include a solo show at Dana L. Wiley Gallery, Dayton, OH, a group show at Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH and a two person show at Gallery 110, Seattle, WA. His work is included in numerous collections both nationally and internationally including the permanent collection of Montgomery County Public Library. Darren received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting from Miami University and is represented by Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH. Darren currently lives in Southwestern Ohio with his wife and two young children.

Wait Till They See What I Can Do Oil, Acrylic, Enamel, Graphite and Hydrographic Printing on Yupo Paper Mounted on Panel 60x48 2018

Cannonballer Oil, Acrylic, Enamel, Graphite and Hydrographic Printing on Yupo Paper Mounted on Panel 60x96 2019

I studied painting with Tony Smith at Hunter College but started out studying biochemistry and physics. I really thought of these fields as philosophy: as an illumination of limits and the backdrop for a discussion of humanity's striving to overcome them. This is not meant to describe an interest in myth, be it social or political, but rather an involvement in the elements of thought and the operations that give rise to the structure of understanding.

I have exhibited nationally and internationally, and have had many solo exhibitions: Nicholas Davies Gallery, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Hal Bromm Gallery, Minus Space Gallery, University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences, and others in NY and abroad.  A recent exhibition at the J.P.Najar Foundation in Dubai resulted in the purchase of a large work. Likewise a painting shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in NYC resulted in a purchase award. Some group exhibitions have been in the Leubsdorf Art Gallery/ Hunter College, Sydney Non Objective/ Australia, Stavanger Kunstmuseum/ Norway, Non- Objectif Sud/ France, American Drawing in the Louisana Museum in Denmark, Stadtishe Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Germany, the MIT List Center in Boston. This year there have been drawings in ‘Flat Out” at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City and “Strange Attractors” at Seton Hall’s Walsh Gallery in NJ. I have received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts (CAPS). The work has been written about in Art Forum, Art in America, The NYTimes, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtSlant and others.Yve Alain Bois has written the catalog essay, “Atoms”, for the exhibition “Linda Francis, Drawings” at Wm Patterson University in 1996.

The two books I mentioned during our interview were : “ The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa, and My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausguaard.

Neutron Star, 2009, Oil on Wood panel, 72”x72"

“We Can Build You”, 2013, oil on wood, 40”x90”.

"Homage to Messier”, 1991, 40”x32”, Chalk and eraser on paper.