Interviews by Brainard Carey

Alice Sheppard from solo work Where Good Souls Fear. Photo by Lisa Niedermeyer.

Alice Sheppard took her first dance class in order to make good on a dare; she loved moving so much that she resigned her academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance. She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs.

Since becoming an independent artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton.

As an emerging, award-winning choreographer, Alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race by exploring the societal and cultural significance of difference.

Alice Sheppard as Andromeda in DESCENT by Kinetic Light. Photo by MANCC / Chris Cameron.

Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of Kinetic LIght in performance a The Whitney Museum. Photo by Filip Wolak.

Chas Ray Krider's photographs are part of a tradition of erotic art that employs exaggeration, mystery and the guilty pleasures of voyeurism. His photographs are about the forms employed in narrative based erotic art.

Chas Ray's work is widely exhibited and published, including three solo book, Motel Fetish by TASCHEN in 2002, 2nd edition 2012. and Do Not Disturb by La Musardine of Paris, 2007, Dirty Rendezvous, Goliath Books, Berlin, 2014. Krider is currently working of a series of self-published books under his banner, I.M.O.S. Editions. Titles: she comes in colors, In a White Room and Reveries of a Day Dreamer.

Chas Ray lives in Columbus Ohio with his wife and small dog. You can find him on Instagram as well.

Motel Fetish image with Dita Von Teese, 1998

PostMotel Fetish period from the series In a White Room, 2016

Zsolt Asztalos was Born in Hungary, in 1974. He lives in Budapest. He studied painting in Hungarian University of Fine Arts. At the beginning of his carrier he focused on the consumer society. His art analyzed the computer technology, the marketing and advertising world, high tech science research and the mass media. In the previous 6-8 years he began to study the history editing in the regard of individual and collective memory. His artworks based on studying the past in various approaches. He is quite interested in renovation of the past, editing world and national history and personal remembering. He uses contemporary equipment to expose his ideas: video, installations, different materials based on photograph.

He was awarded with highest art prize in his country (Munkacsy-prize). He represented Hungary in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 with his installation titled “Fired but Unexploded”. His artworks are exposed in many art markets through Europe: ARCO Madrid, Artissima-Bologna, Vienna Fair, Art Dubai, art markets in Paris, Berlin and London. He usually gives lectures about his art in various universities, for example in Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Zsolt Asztalos participated approx. in 100 group shows through Hungary, London, Madrid, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Venice, Paris etc. and had about 30 solo shows. His artworks can be found in many private collections all over Europe, USA and Middle East.

Walid Siti was born in 1954, in the city of Duhok, in Iraqi-Kurdistan. After graduating in 1976 from the Institute of Fine arts in Baghdad, Siti left Iraq to continue his arts education in Ljubljana, Slovenia before settling in 1984 in the United Kingdom where he lives and works.

The work of Walid Siti traverses a complex terrain of memory and loss, while at the same time offering an acute insight into a world, which for him has been a place of constant change.  The narrative of Siti’s experience, of a life lived far from but still deeply emotionally connected to the place of one’s birth, is one he shares with many exiles. Siti takes inspiration from the cultural heritage of his native land that is crisscrossed with militarized borders and waves of migration.

Solo Exhibitions include, 2017, Zilberman Gallery, Berlin“ The Black Tower”, 2014/15 Istanbul, Edge of Arabia, London,“Reconstruction”. Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York; Rose Issa Projects, London. HIs work is also in Public Collections such as The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah. The British Museum, London. The Imperial War Museum, London. The National Gallery of Amman, Jordan. The World Bank, Washington, DC. Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The Iraq Memory Foundation. Art for American Embassy program, USA. Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE.

Elusive Mountain’ 2018, Barbed Wire & thin aluminium wire 400 x 800 x 300cm

Stone Tales’ 2018, Hard paper, newspaper of cuts & glue 340 x 600 x 10cm

Stone Tales’ 2018, Detail, Hard paper, newspaper of cuts & glue 340 x 600 x 10cm

Wheel of Fortune, Berlin/Paris, The Greek Goddess, Fortuna, spins the wheel at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel. Some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls

photo by Emil Matveev

Asiya Korepanova is a Boston-based Russian award-winning pianist, transcriber, artist, poet, entrepreneur, and composer. Asiya is passionate about the interdisciplinary connections between music and other arts, which led her to create projects where she expresses herself through different mediums at the same time.

She is the founder and artistic director of the annual chamber music festival with special programming “Festival Baltimore”, and president of the non-profit organization “Music for Minds”. Having toured over 20 countries and possessing 60 piano concertos in her repertoire, Asiya often features her original transcriptions and composers' complete collections of works in her solo programs.

To learn more about her projects, go here and that page leads to descriptions of each project, with poems and artwork available to see.

The book mentioned in the interview was Things Fall Apart.

To attend the event mentioned, just click here.

Chasse Neige, 9.6x14.5 inches, Ink on paper, 2007, An image from Tchaikovsky's collection, belonging to the #17 in the cycle, A Distant Past

A Distant Past, 19.5x25.5 inches, Ink and oil pastel on paper, 2010. An image from Liszt transcendental etudes collection, Chasse-Neige

“The effects of color and energy are presented in our daily lives and conditions the spirit “ - Mary Chang

Mary Chang was born in lower Manhattan, New York, USA. She was raised in Fort Greene -Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, where she continues to live with her family and work.  An interdisciplinary artist, painting, printmaking, theater and movement are her art forms. 

Mary attended the School of Visual Arts,  and  worked with Master printers  Shelia Goloborotko and the late  Sheila Marbain.

There was a pause in her work as a painter from the mid 1970’s to the late 1990’s. She spent this time raising her family and focusing on theater. In the mid 1980’s Mary began to study theater, perform and travel. Her theater experience includes: La Mama Experimental Theater in New York, touring Italy as part of the technical crew on Fragments of a Greek Trilogy, directed by Andrei Serban.  She was part of an ensemble group of four American actors and four Swiss actors who developed and co-wrote a play titled In-Ter-View which toured throughout New York area and Switzerland, directed by Walter Riedweg of the Werktheater of Basel Switzerland.  Mary was part of the Immigrant’s Theater Project directed Marcy Arlin where she co-wrote the play Immigration Office, The ensemble performed throughout New York area..  She also worked with director Amir Naderi on his first American film, Manhattan by Numbers shown at New Directors Film Festival (MoMA/Lincoln Center).

Mary studied theater in New York with acting coach Anthony Abeson/mentor, Ada Brown Mather , Carol Rosenfeld of HB Studios,  The Barrow Group, and  Linklater coach  Bobby Troka.

“My experience in theater and art has been an exploration leading me to discover that the line of distance between my process in theater and art are one and the same. My tools interchange." 

In 1999 Mary returned to painting , invited to exhibit by friend and mentor Onnie MIllar artist /educator.

Her work has since been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), Robert Lehman Gallery at Urban Glass as well as various galleries and cultural centers throughout the  New York tri-state area, Massachusetts Brazil and The Netherlands. 

Mary's recent exhibition “A New York State of Mind:Stories From The  Unusual Suspects, curated by Elise Tak and exhibited at De  Cacaofabriek, in the Netherlands September 2018  introduces 14 independent  American Artist from the United States and their Unique stories.

American Dreamer 2018 48”x 48”

Azure 2018 48”x48”

Nikolas Kasinos is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Cyprus in 1988, currently based in Berlin. Having as a core performance and video art, his artistic practice involves the exploration of identity, gender, transformation and mutation through the observation of human behaviour, media, popular culture within socio-political structures. Using his body as a subject - Nikolas explores the collective representation of ‘the self’ within these contexts. Works includes live and video performances, audio-visual installations, sound design, dance and photography.

 

He received his degree in Film & Video from University of The Arts, London, where he was based for 7 years. Within that period he experimented with video art while venturing into performance and developed work which is on-going until now. Through the years he collaborated with many artists such as Ron Athey, Chadd Curry, Ernesto Tomassini, Hector De Gregorio, Anton Mirto, Lina Lapelyte, in multimedia performance based projects. In 2014 he co-founded Ouroboros with visual artist Jeremy Carne focusing on creative and commercial video works until present. In 2016 he initiated RELAPSE collective with artists Vasiliki Antonopoulou and Dimitrios Michailidis aiming to give artists from different disciplines and geographic locations, the opportunity to come together and create a space for discourse.

 

He has exhibited and performed at several venues internationally, including his solo exhibition at EA Gallery at the University of Colorado, at Weld and Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon, The Performance Shop in Limassol, Flux Factory in New York; Chelsea Theatre, Peltz Gallery, Royal College of Art, David Roberts Art Foundation, Cafe OTO in London. Residencies include The Yard in Cyprus, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Dance4 in Nottingham, Skogen in Gothenburg.

The book mentioned in the interview is The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han.

 

@nikolaskasinos // nikolaskasinos.com

Courage in the Face of Reality, 2016, Three Channel Video Installation 20:20 minutes

Sometimes I’m ARrt, 2010–Present, Performance & Multimedia

Seren Morey was born in Massachusetts in 1969 and graduated from Bard College in New York in 1991. Upon graduating she became an assistant to Kiki Smith and then went on to complete an MFA at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 1996. Following school, Morey became an instructor for three years of the courses Painting Processes for materials and techniques and Foundation: Light, Color and Design- a comprehensive color theory course at Pratt Institute.

Morey’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows and reviewed by Robin Pogrebin, Barry Schwabsky and Helen A. Harrison of the New York Times. Her work has also been acquired by multiple collectors both private and public including The Williamsburg Art and Historical Center and The Middlebury College Museum of Art. She currently lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is a partner in Guerra Paint and Pigment in NYC, a specialty resource store for artists.

Âme, 2018, 22x19x4 in.,Ultralight, dispersions and urethane on panel

Zozimos, 2017, Ultralight and dispersions on panel,19.5x16x4in

Ahlem Kebir

Ahlem Kebir, 25 years old. PhD student in cultural heritage and co-founder of Ineffable art & culture.

Ineffable art and culture is a digital Magazine, which strives to embody the concept of “Art and culture for all”, it aspires to a popularization of this discipline, and bring it to a human scale through life experiences.

The magazine focuses on the Algerian culture, but approaches it in a whole new way. We investigate the features of the Algerian identity in art and contemporary practices, in order to discern how the new generations express and affirm themselves in their culture.

Connect on Facebook, Instagram, or through the website.

An article about how young generations live their Algerianity (6th edition pages 40-41)

Photo by Gunnar Tufta

Emireth Herrera is an independent Mexican curator based in New York. She is currently studying the Graduate Program in Art History and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. Her focus is on Latin America and Curatorial Studies.

Her curatorial practice objective is to build a strong discourse to foster diverse conversations through strategies that invite spectators to reflect and establish a critical posture, dialogue and dream. Emireth explores the production of art through multiple formats that are essential to initiate social transformation through democratic processes. In 2018 she started the project “From the Vulnerable Territories to the Utopia”, a series of workshops that highlights the importance of collaboration worldwide, beyond borders, language and ethnic groups.

She holds an MA in Art from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Universidad Autonoma de Coahuila, where she works as a research professor in the arts.

"3459" Curated by Emireth Herrera and Relapse Collective, New York and London, August 2016 Photo by Jung In Jung

Workshop "Between the Vulnerable Territory and the Utopia" by Emireth Herrera in collaboration with Open Place, at Flux Factory, October 2018.Photo by Yuriy Kruchak